I read my bazillion mailing lists by feeding them into a private
(non-root) installation of c-news, which I have kept going for about
30 years (with occasional pain coping with the changes in Unix over
the years, but nowadays things don't change much:).

I've always read this direct from the spool directory, but sshfs is
very slow, and I'd like nntp access.

Unfortunately, I failed to save a copy of nntpd along with c-news, and
now nntpd is no longer to be found anywhere on the web (as far as I
see).

So:

question 1: Can I use INN's nnrpd directly on a c-news spool, or does
nnrpd need other files created by INN ?

question 2: If I decide finally to abandon c-news, should switching my
system over to INN be a simple drop in replacement of binaries, plus
suitable configuration? It rather looks that way. (The only way news
comes in to the system is being being piped into newsspool by procmail
- I guess that would switch to INN's inew.)

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Julian Bradfield <jcb@inf.ed.ac.uk> writes:

I read my bazillion mailing lists by feeding them into a private
(non-root) installation of c-news, which I have kept going for about 30
years (with occasional pain coping with the changes in Unix over the
years, but nowadays things don't change much:).

I've always read this direct from the spool directory, but sshfs is
very slow, and I'd like nntp access.

Unfortunately, I failed to save a copy of nntpd along with c-news, and
now nntpd is no longer to be found anywhere on the web (as far as I
see).

https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

So:

question 1: Can I use INN's nnrpd directly on a c-news spool, or does
nnrpd need other files created by INN ?

nnrpd needs a history file and an overview database, and won't be able to
use the ones generated by C News. It will be happy with the article tree,
but you'll need to run makehistory and makeoverview on it.

question 2: If I decide finally to abandon c-news, should switching my
system over to INN be a simple drop in replacement of binaries, plus
suitable configuration? It rather looks that way. (The only way news
comes in to the system is being being piped into newsspool by procmail
- I guess that would switch to INN's inew.)

Or possibly rnews. Yeah, you'll need to generate the databases as
mentioned above, but INN's tradspool article format should be compatible
with C News. That said, I suspect that C News probably stored files in
native format rather than wire format, so you'll need to tell INN (with
the wireformat: false setting) to do line ending conversion. Or at least that's required for writing; I forget if it figures it out on the fly for reading (it might).

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

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On 2022-11-23, Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

Julian Bradfield <jcb@inf.ed.ac.uk> writes:

[...]

Unfortunately, I failed to save a copy of nntpd along with c-news, and
now nntpd is no longer to be found anywhere on the web (as far as I
see).

https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

Ah, thank you! Need to work more on my google-fu, then...

question 2: If I decide finally to abandon c-news, should switching my
system over to INN be a simple drop in replacement of binaries,
plus

[...]

with C News. That said, I suspect that C News probably stored files in native format rather than wire format, so you'll need to tell INN (with

Yes, it does.

Thanks very much!

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Julian Bradfield <jcb@inf.ed.ac.uk> writes:

On 2022-11-23, Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

Ah, thank you! Need to work more on my google-fu, then...

I don't think the contents is in Google in any useful way, and given the
name of the software, it's quite hard to find with search. If you didn't
know it existed, I'm not sure how you'd find out with Google. I just
happened to remember that both C News and its NNTP implementation were
packaged for Debian back in the day, and tried a few variations on the
package name until I found the right one.

--
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

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On 2022-11-24, Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

Julian Bradfield <jcb@inf.ed.ac.uk> writes:

On 2022-11-23, Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

Ah, thank you! Need to work more on my google-fu, then...

I don't think the contents is in Google in any useful way, and given the
name of the software, it's quite hard to find with search. If you didn't know it existed, I'm not sure how you'd find out with Google. I just

Thanks for making me feel better :)

I tried to get it working, but there's some deadlock in the networking
(which I also suffer with another ancient program), and it's not worth
the effort of fixing.

So I have converted my system over to INN - thanks!

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