Conference gyro::internet_toolss

Does MSNews get archived anywhere like Deja News?

Greg

Is there a good reason why we can't have the msnews groups available on our
normal internal servers?  I know it's possible, as my ISP (Ultranet) carries
them on its servers.  The current setup makes it difficult to follow the MS
groups, as I have to switch servers, and makes it impossible to cross-post.
If I used Netscape News, switching servers isn't too difficult, but Netscape
News likes to corrupt my postings (inserting line breaks where they don't
belong), so I gave up on it and switched back to mxrn, which doesn't cleanly
handle multiple servers.

					Steve

	I have msnews.* available on wntnews.mro.dec.com along with the comp.*
  and Installshield.* news groups.  If that's all you need then you can use
  wntnews.

		Danny

Every time that I ask the Microsoft people about getting a news feed,
they have either no capability or intent of distributing their content
via NNTP. My answer to this is to set up TCP relays for NNRP
connections to MS' own servers. Danny chooses to use NNRP to populate
his server with microsoft.* heirarchies; I wish he wouldn't, but
that's a difference of opinion, not policy. 

If you know someone at whatever ISP that has successfully gotten
Microsoft to give them a newsfeed, send me their name in mail. I'd be
happy to take a feed rather than use the kludge we have in place
now. The kludge gets the job done, though. 

Stephen
- -----
Stephen Stuart				stuart@pa.dec.com
Network Systems Laboratory
Digital Equipment Corporation
[posted by Notes-News gateway]

Ok - I'll ask my ISP how they do it.

			Steve

> Every time that I ask the Microsoft people about getting a news feed,
> they have either no capability or intent of distributing their content
> via NNTP. My answer to this is to set up TCP relays for NNRP
> connections to MS' own servers. Danny chooses to use NNRP to populate
> his server with microsoft.* heirarchies; I wish he wouldn't, but
> that's a difference of opinion, not policy. 

	Actually the reason that I'm doing that is NOT a difference of opinion
  as much as the need to test functionality of DNews.  I make NO guarantee
  that wntnews will continue to work this way or continue to be available.
  That's why it's not announced in NEWS-BACKBONE.

> If you know someone at whatever ISP that has successfully gotten
> Microsoft to give them a newsfeed, send me their name in mail. I'd be
> happy to take a feed rather than use the kludge we have in place
> now. The kludge gets the job done, though. 
> 
	I believe that Microsoft has refused to supply ANYONE with a feed
  as a matter of policy, in order to maintain control over the newsgroups
  and messages.

		Danny

    could you give us a *brief* description of what the difference is
    between NNTP and NNRP and why would a NNRP solutiuon be considered 
    a "kludge"
    
    Just interested,
    Thanks,
    
    /Chris/

    Here's the reply I got from the support staff at my ISP:
    


>I have a sort-of-related question.  It was my understanding that
>Microsoft refuses to provide news feeds for its microsoft.*
>newsgroups. Yet Ultranet has them.  How?

Steve, 


I've never heard that m$ 'refuses' to provide feeds.  I doubt they're
interested in handing a feed to anyone that asks, but they are providing
feeds to enough large institutions that we get articles from our feeds.
Note that the groups we get (for the exception of one) are all ms.public
groups - maybe they refuse to hand out the .private groups, which would
be pretty self evident, etc, etc...

as well, you can also suck news via nnrpd, the reader daemon, so 
you don't necessarily have to have an innfeed to snag and 
redistribute articles...


hope that helps answer your question.  We get them from our upstream
feeds.

btw Altavista is IMHO disadavantaged by not indexing the msnews
newsgroups - dejanews has them. (I sent email to Altavista - no
reply yet).

Greg.
[posted by Notes-News gateway]

Free advice is worth every cent (lionel@quark.enet.dec.com) wrote:
: Title: Access to msnews.microsoft.com newsgroups
: Reply Title: (none)

Well, go figure; the microsoft.* hierarchy is in the ISC newsgroups
file. I'll stick them in the active file, and we'll see what happens.

Stephen
--
- -----
Stephen Stuart				stuart@pa.dec.com
Network Systems Laboratory
Digital Equipment Corporation
[posted by Notes-News gateway]

: Well, go figure; the microsoft.* hierarchy is in the ISC newsgroups
: file. I'll stick them in the active file, and we'll see what happens.

What happened is that some articles started showing up. They should
start appearing in AV's index shortly (both AV and usenet are fed from
news1.digital.com and news2.digital.com).

Stephen
--
- -----
Stephen Stuart				stuart@pa.dec.com
Network Systems Laboratory
Digital Equipment Corporation
[posted by Notes-News gateway]

Thanks - I saw the groups appear - now to wait for some traffic in the one
I'm interested in....

				Steve