Defining a News Server

To be able to read news, the Line Mode Browser (www) needs the address of a news server. This is a machine which runs the NNTP protocol. If you already use internet news on your site, you will have one of these. There are several ways you can tell wwwwhich news server to use.

Note you may also have your machine enabled as being authorized to pick up news from the news server by that server's system manager.

For a NeXT

The NeXT defaults are read, looking for a value for "NewsHost" for application name "WorldWideWeb", then for a global default, then for application named "News".

All other cases

On all other platforms (?) you can do one of the following in order to define a news server.

Set an environment variable

You can set the environment variable NNTPSERVER to be the internet address of the server. As a n example, you can do this in your .login file, or your .cshrc file. (On VMS, use a logical name, on VM/CMS, the CENV globalv table).

Use a file

The file /usr/local/lib/rn/server will be read if it exists and no environment variable is defined. It should contain the single line containing the name of the news server. This filename may be overridden at compile time by defining the SERVER_FILE symbol to be the quoted string.

At Compile Time

If you are installing www for several people, you can set the default by defining the variable DEFAULT_NEWS_HOST to be the quoted string of the server name on the command line for the compilation of the HTNews.c module For example, use the option (check your own compiler's command line syntax)

	-DDEFAULT_NEWS_HOST="mynewshost.domain"

Use a domain name alias

If no other default news host is found, the software looks for a machine with name or alias "news" in the local domain. If your domain has a single news server which you would like to use as a default, and the person in charge of the domain name registration agrees, then make an alias "news" for the server. This will have the management advantage that the administration can move the news server without any trouble later.