Florian Amrhein : Start

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-> newsportal -> doc -> faq

Is NewsPortal still supported?

No.

What newsserver should I use?

Normally, NewsPortal is made for people who already own a newsserver with local groups.

If you want to give your users access to usenet groups, and want to do this by using an external newsserver, you should better do this by installing your own newsserver. Newsportal can produce much load on the newsserver, so the most administrators of newsserver would not like it, if you use their newsservers without asking.

A good newsserver (for Unix) is INN.

How can I configure NewsPortal to access groups on different servers?

If you have, for example three hierarchies a.ALL, b.ALL and c.ALL on three different servers A, B and C, you have to the following:

First, configure newsserver normally in your config.inc.php by setting $server to A. For the servers B and C create two config-files named, for example, server-B.inc and server-C.inc. Write <? $server="news.serverB.org"; ?> in server-B.inc and the corresponding for C into server-C.inc.

Now, you have to tell newsportal, when it has to use the configuration files for B and C, because until this point newsportal only use A as default.

This can be done by setting the $group_config in config.inc.php. For example like this, to bind hierarchy b.ALL to server B and hierarchie c.ALL to server C:

$group_config=array(
	      '^b\.' => "server-B.inc",
	      '^c\.' => "server-C.inc"
);

Now, thread.php, article.php and post.php should use the right server. You can test this by opening http://yourserver.org/thread.php?group=b.groupname

The problem is, that index.php can only use one server while fetching the group-informations.

The only solution with the actual version of NewsPortal is to delete index.php and replace it with a static html-file that links to the single groups via thread.php.

Later versions of NewsPortal will have more comfortable solutions for this.

How does Newsportal store its data?

Newsportal stores its data in form of plain text files in its spool directory. It only stores the thread data, not the articles itself, unless you activate the article-cache.

Will it grow?

Normally you have set $maxarticles, so Newsportal doesn't fetch more than this number of article-overviews from every group. If all your groups have more than $maxarticles articles in it, the content of your spool directory will not grow.

But, if you have activated the article-cache, then the spool can grow, because every article can have a different size. If, for example, suddenly appears an article with a very long attachment on it, this attachment will be stored in the spool and let your spool grow. The spool will later shrink, when the article will be deleted, when it reaches the "horizont" defined by $maxarticles.

Do I have to set a holding time for old articles?

No, this is not necessary, and not possible at the moment. Later, for the article-cache, there will be such a setting, so that articles can be deleted before they reaches their horizont.
But you can manually or by script remove everything in your spool directory.

NewsPortal doesn't want to connect to the newsserver

There are several reasons why Newsportal doesn't connect to your newsserver.

Do you try to use the newsserver of your dialin provider? Normally, such newsservers only work if you connect to them from inside the network of the provider. So, at home you can use their newsserver, but your webserver somewhere in the internet is not allowed to connect.
You try to use Newsportal on a shared webserver? Often provider of such servers block outgoing connections because of safety reasons or because it is difficult to charge you for the traffic you make. You have to move to another provider, or use a dedicated or virtual server.

Florian Amrhein