Alternatives to a local Usenet server

[Foteos Macrides]

In article <33b6kj$m9e at news.ycc.yale.edu>,
una at doliolum.biology.yale.edu (Una Smith) writes:
>Foteos Macrides <macrides at sci.wfeb.edu> wrote:
>>[...]
>>I suspect there are many sites which do not have a news server
>>installed, and are unlikely to carry news locally, but would
>>setup a news reader specifically to read bionet.*, or would
>>point their WWW clients to net.bio.net for that hierarchy.
>
>[Fote:  your lines are too long to fit in my newsreader without
>wrapping.]

	Set your column width to 80.  Our editor sends maximum 78
character lines (but I'll set it to 64 for this message 8-).

>About WWW, Fote, I assume you are thinking of a newsreader on
>net.bio.net being accessible from the WWW server there.  That
>should not be any major problem, and it might be significantly
>more useful than simply browsing through the archives for each
>group using the WWW or gopher client directly.  I think there
>are a lot of people who already depend on the archive servers,
>instead of using either a local Usenet server or subscriptions.

	It's not necessary to use a WWW server.  All that's
necessary is for the client's host to have access to an NNTP
server to which the environment variable NNTPSERVER can be set.
A server (http, gopher, or ftp) *could* provide a formatted cover
page with news links for the bionet.* groups, but a local HTML
file (accessed directly by the client) could be used instead, or
the user could simply pass a news URL on the command line, e.g.,
if using lynx:

	lynx news:bionet.software.www

We have no need of such a service (we have a news server which
carries the bionet hierarchy), but yes, there are hundreds of
thousands of Internet sites which don't have access to news.

				Fote

==============================================================
 Foteos Macrides           Worcester Fndn. for Exptl. Biology
 MACRIDES at SCI.WFEB.EDU     222 Maple Av, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
==============================================================