Questions I got asked (not frequently yet) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ General topics Q: Why does leafnode complain about a missing Path: header? Q: So jNewsGate is not fully NNTP compatible? Q: I installed a new plugin, why are there no new groups? Q: When does jNewsGate tell the plugins to fetch new articles? Q: Why are the log messages formatted that ugly? Q: Where are the articles stored? Q: Can I configure the location of the data directory? Q: Can I disable the GUI window? Q: Why does the config file look like garbage? Q: How can I use password auth for jNewsGate? Plugins Q: How can I fetch articles and threads with the Google Groups plugin? Answers ~~~~~~~ General topics ============== Q: Why does leafnode complain about a missing Path: header? Because it is missing... Will be fixed in next release. Q: So jNewsGate is not fully NNTP compatible? Correct. At the moment, the "core" commands NEXT and LAST are still missing. Additionally, most NNTP extensions (except XOVER, LIST OVERVIEW.FMT and DATE) are not implemented. However, I do not know any news readers that *really* need them. Q: I installed a new plugin, why are there no new groups? The NEWGSOUPS command is implemented since Version 0.2. So you have to refresh the complete group list in your news client after updating to 0.2 and you will see the group. It will work in the future then. Q: When does jNewsGate tell the plugins to fetch new articles? Roughly speaking: whenever you open a new NNTP connection to it. (So if your NNTP client leaves the connection open for days, you won't get new articles). More precisely: If you are authenticated by IP (or don't use any authentication in jNewsGate), every NNTP connection can cause an update request to the plugins. If you need password auth, this request is delayed until you have authenticated properly (This prevents running "expensive" updates caused by an "abuser" of the service.) However, the update request will be only sent, if the last sent update request has been before more than UPDATE_INTERVAL (hard coded in jnewsgate.impl.MultiGroupSource) milliseconds - this defaults to 5 seconds. And plugins may delay their fetchings even more - HTTP plugins usually wait for webcache.flushinterval (config option) milliseconds before they start the next request. If you doubt that any update requests get fired (for an unknown reason), you can subscribe to the jnewsgate.test.stats group - every update request will cause a posting there. (So, if you get these but do not get new data from your plugins, it's the plugin's fault...) Q: Why are the log messages formatted that ugly? Blame Sun - it's the Java Logging Framework. I know it's ugly (especially that the log levels are translated), but don't have time to write a new Formatter class at the moment. If you know any good one (that is GPL compatible), tell me. Q: Where are the articles stored? Depends on the plugin. Current plugins (heise, phpbb, google) do not store them at all on hard disk - they only cache them in memory. Only metadata (which articles got which article numbers and similar things) are stored in the data directory. The test.postable plugin however stores all articles because there is no other way to retrieve them. So, if you use an online reader (or a reader that only stores XOVERS), depending on your reading style you might download an article multiple times. But that is the same with NNTP servers. If you want to read articles offline, use an offline reader or a local NNTP server. Q: Can I configure the location of the data directory? Not yet. On Unix systems you can symlink it to wherever you like. On other systems, you have to live with the default. From 0.2 on there will be a datadir= option you can use to give the path to the data dir. Q: Can I disable the GUI window? Sure. Just change gui=on to gui=off in the config file. Q: Why does the config file look like garbage? I guess you are using Windows' "notepad" editor for viewing it. That one cannot handle UNIX text files correctly. Use another editor (even WordPad is better in that respect) or convert the file to a Windows text file - jNewsGate can load Unix, Windows and Macintosh text files. Q: How can I use password auth for jNewsGate? Edit the config file. Comment out the auth.type=null by placing a # before it (or delete that line). Then remove the # signs before the auth.type=list and following lines. This will look like the following example: auth.type=list auth.count=2 auth.0.user=me auth.0.pass=cleartext:me auth.1.user=you auth.1.pass=cleartext:you auth.1.noposting=on auth.count specifies how many user/password combinations you have. These are numbered from 0 to count-1. For each combination you can specify a user name in clear text and either a clear text or an encrypted password. To use the cleartext password "test", use auth.0.pass=cleartext:test To use an encrypted MD5 password, you must encrypt the password with another program that can encrypt MD5 passwords. There is no function to do this inside jNewsGate in Version 0.1. In 0.2 or higher you can call java -jar jnewsgate.jar buildhash md5 test and get Hash value for test is '098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6' (You can use this function as well to build "cleartext hashes", but that does not have any practical use... To use the encrypted password "test", use: auth.0.pass=md5:098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6 Plugins ======= Q: How can I fetch articles and threads with the Google Groups plugin? Point your browser to http://localhost/60061 (600613 is "leetspeak" for Google, but that is too long for a port number). There you can enter a search term or a Message-ID. On the resulting page, there are "red links" called "Add" and "Add thread". Click the one you prefer and wait for the confirmation message. When you have added all threads you want to have, fetch them from the jnewsgate.google.groups group and maybe clear the group by clicking the appropriate link on the web interface. Alternatively, if your NNTP client supports fetching articles by Message-ID, just request a Message-ID from jNewsGate and you will get it then. These articles are *not* saved in the jnewsgate.google.groups group (unless you specify "gs.gg.autoadd=true" in the config file).