5 Setting Up News as a Local Reader/Server

5.7 Providing a foreign command to run News

News.Exe is written to be invoked by a foreign command from DCL, and will parse its own command line. You should add a line to your system-wide login procedure which sets up this command, e.g.
$ News == "$News_Manager:News"

If you plan to use news as a local reader in some sessions, and as an NNTP client in separate sessions (e.g. for different hierarchies), then you should define two separate commands to invoke News, e.g.
$ News == "$News_Manager:News/NoNetServer" ! for local sessions
$ RemoteNews == "$News_Manager:News/NetServer=site/NetProtocol=protocol"

where site in the second command is the name of the NNTP server, and protocol is the name of the NNTP transport protocol you specified when you built News. Note that you may specify the NNTP server name transport protocol in other ways (see the sections describing the logical names News_NNTP_Server and News_NNTP_Protocol for more information), but you must place at least the qualifier /NetServer on the command line if you want to invoke News as an NNTP client when the logical name News_Root is properly defined.

If you have multiple NNTP servers available to you, you should in general use one server consistently for a given set of newsgroups, since the item number assigned to a newsitem may vary from server to server, so the record of items read which is stored in you NewsRC file is valid only for that server. You can use different servers to read different newsgroups, and News will maintain different NewsRC files for each server (names Sys$Login:NewsRC.server, where server is the name of the NNTP server to which that file is tied, with all '.' characters in the server name replaced by the character '-'. In addition, News stores the name of the NNTP server and the transport protocol used to connect to that server in the NewsRC file, and will not use a NewsRC file which specifies a different server name than the one to which it is currently connected.

previous: 5.6.2 Addresses for incoming news feeds
next: 5.8 Running News for the first time
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