Perth Linux Users' Group

PLUG newsgroups

The PLUG news server provides an alternate way of reading and posting to the PLUG mailing list. It may be more convenient for those who don't want to receive high volumes of e-mail, or who find their news reader interface more convenient than their mail client. Messages posted to one of the PLUG newsgroups are sent on to the appropriate mailing list, and likewise any posts to the mailing list appear in the newsgroups.

Note that this service is currently considered experimental, and things may break or misbehave. If you encounter problems with the PLUG news server, please contact webmasters@plug.org.au about it.

Connecting to the news server

First of all, you will need a news reader that understands NNTP. Commonly used news readers under Linux include Mozilla, Thunderbird, KNode and Pan.

Point your news reader at news.plug.org.au, port 119. If, for some reason, your ISP blocks port 119, you can try using port 1190 instead.

You need to log in to be able to access the news server. Your user name is the e-mail address that you are subscribed to the PLUG mailing list with (e.g. cameron@patrick.wattle.id.au). Your password is your Mailman password. If you have forgotten your Mailman password, you can have it e-mailed to you by visiting the Mailman list info page, choosing "unsubscribe or edit options" and then "password reminder".

We are still working on a way of obtaining an account on the news server without subscribing to the list. For the moment, you can subscribe to the list and then disable mail delivery on the Mailman options page.

Available newsgroups

• plug.list: equivalent to the main PLUG mailing list
• plug.rant: equivalent to the off-topic list

Known problems

Our news server is quite strict on what Message-IDs it considers to be valid. If it rejects the Message-ID on a message, the mail-to-news gateway will generate a new one for it. Unfortunately, this means that replies to such messages will not be threaded correctly. One fix would be to have Mailman fix the Message-IDs where possible. Another is to mangle keep track of the old and new Message-IDs, and mangle the References and In-Reply-To headers on messages as they pass between mail and news.

The Followup-To: header is not converted into an appropriate Mail-Followup-To: header yet, and vice versa.

Probably more stuff we haven't found yet.

Back to the resources page, or the PLUG home page.