News Server address

To be able to read news, the www program 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 www which news server to use.

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

Exception

On 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

Set an environment variable

You can set the environment variable NNTPSERVER to be the internet address of the server. You can do this in your .login 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 fo 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 deafult 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 managemnt advantage that the administration can move the news server without any trouble later. (This is the way it is done at CERN).
Tim BL