I’m one of the few people I know who still read news. Not newspapers, not news websites. Newsgroups.
Why have they fallen by the wayside on the modern internet? Something to do with the September that never ended? Who knows.
But there are a few select (mostly technical) groups which I like to catch up on every day or two.
NNTP seems to be a painfully slow protocol though – either that, or the various ISPs I’ve used are in the habit of throttling it. Neither would surprise me. But I’ve found slrnpull to be a great offline solution. It downloads all the unread articles in your subscribed groups, and stores them on your local machine for later perusal.
There’s even a Debian package for it – so it’s simple to install on my distro of choice. Except the package is broken, and doesn’t tell you how to fix it. Here’s a quick guide.
- editor /etc/news/server – enter the name of your news server
- editor /etc/news/slrnpull.conf – append the names of the newsgroups you read. The comments within the file explain the syntax.
- mv /etc/cron.daily/slrnpull /etc/cron.hourly/ – Tell cron to run slrnpull hourly instead of daily
- cd /var/spool/ ; ln -s slrnpull/news/ news – This is the crucial step that seems to be missing from the package install script. A bug has been filed here.
- wait for the cronjob to run, or run it manually
- slrn –spool – You’re now reading all articles from the spool on your local machine, so there’s no network latency whatsoever.
Maybe it’s because I run my own news server, but I don’t find nntp particular slow. If I post something to XXXX.test, I start getting autoreplies from sites in Austria and Italy before trn actually comes back from posting to the article menu.
I remember when we were doing news over UUCP, and getting so amazed the first time I got a reply from somebody in Australia within a few hours. And then I emailed the guy to express my amazement, and getting a response from him within 10 or 15 minutes! That was back when uunet were the good guys.
I was really referring to the delay between selecting the header in slrn, and the article actually being retrieved from the remote server.
Considering a typical text article is only a few kilobytes, and my ADSL downstream speed is about 60k/sec, it’s frustrating when it takes several seconds to download the article…
As well as reading news from my local server, I’m also reading it from my ISP and from NCF in Ottawa and Gradwell in England. I’ve never noticed a significant delay. But then again, I use trn, which maybe uses a different method of pulling in articles than slrn does.
Maybe. Or maybe your ISP doesn’t suck. Or maybe those news feeds are a tad more responsive than plus.net‘s. And supernews‘s (from when alt.binaries.sounds.radio.bbc was still worth using)…
usenet. fading. goes.
meat space memory fades slow.
the net is quicker.
Expressing yourself
In seventeen syllables
Is quite difficult.