CS251 - Newsgroup Help

Posting to the newsgroup from off-campus computers

Those of you who were in residence last year but are living off-campus this year may be surprised when you are no longer able to post to the newsgroup from your home computer. This is because you must post from an on-campus machine, meaning the most straightforward way to do this is to log in to your account from a school computer to post.

If you wish to post from home, you will have to log in to your math account. The simplest way to do this from a Windows machine is to use the built-in telnet client.

• Go to the "Run" option in the Start menu.
• Type "telnet" followed by your favourite server; ie, telnet rees.cs.uwaterloo.ca, where "rees" can be substituted for "fitch" or whatever server you would like.
• You will now be able to use any available text client on the undergrad machines. There several options, including trn and pine. Instructions are listed below for configuring pine to read news.

There are other remote login programs available for download for Windows, including ssh utilities, which many people prefer. From a Linux machine, this will probably already be included, and the command ssh -X {server-name} will even allow you to run programs like emacs which require opening another window.

Configuring Pine to read news

• Upon loading Pine, press "S" for setup, and then "C" for config.
• Move down to the fourth item in the list, "nntp-server."
• Press "A" to add text, and then type news.math.uwaterloo.ca in this location. Press "E" to exit, then "Y" to save the changes you made.

You will now be able to access the newsgroup through the "FOLDER LIST" option in the main menu.