Demon's Usenet news service

The past few days (November 2008), I've had several contacts from worried users of Snews. Demon Internet are changing their arrangements for provision of access to Usenet by their customers.

The details are on http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/networkstatus/serviceannouncements/announc... and are a cause for concern to users still collecting news with the old MSDOS software. They changed over on November 6th, with no period of parallel running and dropping the ability to collect news with the 'newnews' protocol. Of course, in these days post-1984, with every marketing 'droid and his dog fluent in Newspeak, it's no surprise to see their announcement end with the words "We hope the replacement news service provides a useful enhancement to your enjoyment of our service"! Enhancement, indeed. How ironic.

Snews is an offline newsreader. It maintains a 'newsbase' (a set of files) and includes a program called Unbatch which takes a file of news articles and adds them to the newsbase. The origin of the file is of no concern to Unbatch, though of course it is almost always generated by one of the Ka9q variants.

So solving the problem of moving to a new server is mainly about Ka9q, not Snews.

Demon's own version of Ka9q (last supported around 2002?) now reports:

502 NEWNEWS Permission Denied
NNTP Error while getting NEWNEWS

So the solutions available are:
* find another news server that supports the Newnews command
* find a version of ka9q that is capable of fetching news by article number
* modify your favourite version of ka9q yourself and recompile it
* access Usenet by some other method

I have no personal experience of other news servers (and indeed stopped using Demon's server when I cancelled my account with them in 1999). Some in demon.service are recommending http://www.aioe.org as a free alternative but with warnings/restrictions and others are suggesting NIN (http://news.individual.net/) which costs 10 euros per year.

NIN requires authentication, which GremNos certainly provides but which the standard Demon Ka9q does not. That suggests aioe might be slightly more straightforward, though many would recommend switching to GremNos anyway (collect it from Simon Turner's website http://www.ashes.demon.co.uk/gremnos.htm) as it is much "cleaner" code and has some extra goodies too.

Changing news servers needs no more than a single edit to a line in autoexec.net.

Both the Demon Ka9q and GremNos need newnews support, so they will not work with the new Demon server. Another alternative is Yan, which diverged from Demon's path a long time ago and does support collection by article number as well as newnews. Yan is significantly different from Demon's KA9Q -- vastly more so than GremNos -- but it may be your only option if you want to stay with Demon's server. Ian's software page (including YAN) is at http://www.alexr22ian.plus.com/wotsits/index.htm.

If Yan is not to your taste it could be worth studying its news client with a view to porting it to GremNos. If you have a tame programmer to hand, it's a SMoP.

There is also the question of how to post to Usenet. If Demon's mail2news gateway is not still functioning you won't be able to post articles with Demon's Ka9q. Both GremNOS and YAN support authentication and the NNTP POST command, which allows you to post articles properly direct to the server.

More radical solutions to reading Usenet would be to drop doing it via Ka9q. With a web browser you can access much of Usenet via Google 'groups' (click on 'more' on Google's front page). Or you could move to a Linux system, where software is likely to be enthusiastically supported, in contrast with MSDOS applications, alas.

Much of the information on this page is derived from Simon Turner (simon at twoplaces.co.uk) and Pete Disdale.

Here's some further info from Simon, relevant if you're running GremNos:

To save you editing your AUTOEXEC.NET, you can do it on the fly. Here
are some revised instructions (steps 1-7 are unchanged, but are
included here for completeness; step 8 is new):

1. Back up C:\DEMON\SPOOL\NEWS\HISTORY and NNTP.DAT if you're feeling
paranoid (which is always a good thing when testing software)

2. Create a new directory C:\DEMON\SPOOL\NQUEUE (this is the default
news queue directory in GremNOS, with pattern *.TXT, and avoids
any potential clashes with the mail spool)

3. Edit the appropriate SNEWS.RC to add the following lines, backing
up the original (of course):

directpost 1
directpostqueue C:\DEMON\SPOOL\NQUEUE
directpostextn txt

4. Run SNews, check with F2 that direct posting is enabled as
expected, and post an article to demon.test

5. Check that there is a *.TXT file in C:\DEMON\SPOOL\NQUEUE
containing your post

6. Connect to Demon; run "nntp showqueue" in GremNOS to see if the
post is listed in the queue

7. Run "nntp post only" to turn on NNTP posting, but without trying
to download any articles afterwards

8. Run "nntp listservers" to check that you've got a server set up:
if it doesn't respond "news.demon.co.uk (345/900)" or similar,
run "nntp addserver news.demon.co.uk 900" to add the server and
check again

9. If you want to see the details of the NNTP exchange (recommended
for a first test), run "nntp trace 3": don't use level 4+ unless
you really want to see everything, because it will produce too
much information

10. Run "nntp kick" and see if it (a) connects to Demon's server, and
(b) posts the article, without making any attempt to download news

11. Give it a few minutes and check on Google groups to see if it has
arrived.

For reference, my full set of Demon NNTP commands in AUTOEXEC.NET
used to look like this:

nntp groups demon.announce demon.ip.support.pc.announce
nntp addserver news.demon.co.uk 600
nntp newgroups on
nntp dir C:\DEMON\SPOOL\ARTICLES
nntp trace 1
nntp verbose on
nntp batch on 8
nntp safety off

These days I use AAISP's server and have "nntp post only" set as well.
[end of quote from Simon]