discuss: HOWTO on setting up a NewsGroup Server
Subject:
Re: HOWTO on setting up a NewsGroup Server
From:
Shuvam ####@####.####
Date:
6 Aug 2002 11:32:09 -0000
Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.31.0208061650250.32511-100000@sm.starcomsoftware.com>
> Shuvam wrote:
> > [...] A lot of servers have huge searchable Usenet article
> > databases with Web front-ends, but they appear to
> > guard the innards from direct downloads.
>
> This 'protection' is trivial to circumvent.
> I did so for one of my pet projects
Yes, I guess this is very doable, once you can see that they have a Web
interface where you can fetch articles in (almost) plain ASCII form one
by one. I guess after this it becomes a question of cracking the
meaning of the URL and its parameters.
> The trick is to spoof the user agent:
>
> wget --user-agent="Links (0.96; Unix)" ...
Great idea. I presume this makes the site dish out simply formatted data
instead of multi-frame tabular stuff?
Can your software then be modified to, say, download "the last 1000
articles in x.y.z" one at a time? If yes, then Lloyd's question of
getting a sizable local load of articles can be addressed, and we can
offer new Usenet admins a way of getting a sizable article collection to
prime their servers on Day 1.
Shuvam
