F I D O N E W S -- Volume 13, Number 32 5 August 1996 +----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | The newsletter of the | ISSN 1198-4589 Published by: | | FidoNet BBS community | "FidoNews" | | _ | 1-407-383-1372 [1:1/23] | | / \ | | | /|oo \ | | | (_| /_) | | | _`@/_ \ _ | | | | | \ \\ | Editor: | | | (*) | \ )) | Christopher Baker 1:374/14 | | |__U__| / \// | | | _//|| _\ / | | | (_/(_|(____/ | | | (jm) | Newspapers should have no friends. | | | -- JOSEPH PULITZER | +----------------------------+-----------------------------------------+ | Submission address: FidoNews Editor 1:1/23 | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | MORE addresses: | | | | submissions=> cbaker84@digital.net | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | For information, copyrights, article submissions, | | obtaining copies of FidoNews or the internet gateway FAQ | | please refer to the end of this file. | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ IS FIDONEWS WORKING FOR YOU YET? Table of Contents 1. EDITORIAL ................................................ 1 So far, so good? ......................................... 1 2. ARTICLES ................................................. 2 Creating Network Wide Bulletins [I] ...................... 2 A GNU Fido? .............................................. 6 Is He In A Godda Da Vida? ................................ 8 ANIMANIACS Echo! ......................................... 13 There might be some point in this ........................ 14 3. FIDONET HISTORY .......................................... 17 FidoNet History 30 Jul 93 [Part 3 of 3] ................. 17 The VERY FIRST FidoNews ever published! .................. 19 4. WE GET EMAIL ............................................. 24 5. NET HUMOR ................................................ 26 Fido is a dog, yes? ...................................... 26 6. COMIX IN ASCII ........................................... 29 Mapping your FidoNet Node? ............................... 29 7. ADVERTISE YOUR FREE SERVICE/EVENT ........................ 30 Sorcery v0.72 Wide Beta RELEASED! ........................ 30 8. QUESTION OF THE WEEK ..................................... 31 How many of you have regular FidoNet gatherings? ......... 31 9. NOTICES .................................................. 32 Future History ........................................... 32 10. FIDONET SOFTWARE LISTING ................................ 33 Latest Greatest Software Versions ........................ 33 And more! FIDONEWS 13-32 Page 1 5 Aug 1996 ================================================================= EDITORIAL ================================================================= FidoNews is moving right along. Submissions are becoming stable and steady. The format has settled in and folks are even sending in new dates for the calendar. [grin] Regarding submissions - if you want to have an article title appear in the Table of Contents of the Issue, you MUST put the title line on the FIRST LINE at the FIRST COLUMN of your text. I will adjust ARTSPEC.DOC to make this more clear. If the asterisk line appears ANYWHERE else in your text, it will be treated as part of the text and will neither be added to the Table of Contents nor stripped out. The FidoNews public-key has been removed from direct publishing in the Issues due to concerns expressed by ZC1. The public-key continues to be available by file-request for FNEWSKEY or download from this system. I have requested a ZCC ruling about its future inclusion in the FidoNews. Nothing beats the weekly distribution of FidoNews as a transport mechanism to most of FidoNet. Please note that the FidoNet Software Listing section begins its second incarnation in today's Issue. These listings will now be coordinated by Peter Popovich at 1:363/264. Send your corrections, additions, and updates directly to him via Netmail. He is beginning his task by repeating the last version listing that appeared in FidoNews back in 1992. Obviously, this means MOST if not all of the listings are hideously out-of-date. If you have personal knowledge of current versions of any of these listed programs OR of NEW programs not listed, please let Peter know ASAP and he will verify and adjust the listing. This will be a cooperative project that will take time to get up and running 100%. Your assistance is actively solicited. The Reviews column of Damian Walker is not ready yet while he's tracking down a couple more updates to test. It should be appearing next week or the week thereafter. Once again, EVERYBODY who reads FidoNews is ENCOURAGED to throw their two cents [or ten bucks] into this forum. The FIDONEWS Echo is flowing over the Stars and we're still waiting for Planet Connect to update their configuration to get it out to everyone else. If you don't have Netmail or email access, you can still contribute via FIDONEWS Echo once we get that going everywhere. I hope you're enjoying the renovated FidoNews as much I am. [grin] C.B. NOTE: I got several responses to last week's Question of the Week about archives of ALL the FidoNews issues ever published. My thanks to all who pointed me to obtaining a complete set. They are now available here for file-request or download as listed in the Masthead at the end of every Issue. ----------------------------------------------------------------- FIDONEWS 13-32 Page 2 5 Aug 1996 ================================================================= ARTICLES ================================================================= Creating Network Wide Bulletins [I] Damian Walker, 2:2502/666 My article in FidoNews last week made mention of network-wide bulletins made possible by document server software. Starting this week I will elaborate on the idea, with a two-part tutorial on how to offer your own bulletin to other Fidonet systems and users. I shall concentrate on three pieces of software for the purposes of this article. These are NetMgr 1.00.g4, FDInt 1.00 and InfoMail 1.11. NetMgr is a popular general-purpose netmail tool written by Gerard van Essen of 2:281/527. It is configured using a text file, and is capable of acting as much more than a document server. Needless to say, I will be concentrating on its abilities as a document server for this article. FDInt is a utility for FrontDoor sysops, written by Colin Turner of 2:443/13. Again, it is a general purpose tool, of which the document server is only a small part. InfoMail needs no introduction for regular readers of FidoNews, as it has been advertised in issue 1329. It is my own creation, and it is a dedicated document server for sysops using a *.MSG netmail area. Please accept my apologies for the lack of coverage of other platforms, as it is impossible for me to test the methods described in this article with any program that doesn't run on a DOS PC. I am also limited to software which I have found locally, or on the Internet. If you know of any other software with document server capabilities, be sure to let FidoNews readers know about it. Full information is available in the documentation which comes with the software, and I will not attempt to duplicate that information here. The purpose of this article is as much to show you what is involved in producing network-wide bulletins as to show you how to use the software for this purpose. Now we move on to the business of the day, that of setting up a bulletin. Before you start, you really need to know what information you want to offer, and indeed, if a bulletin is the best way to do it. A few ideas spring to mind as ideal uses for a document server, some of which I may have mentioned in my article in FidoNews 1329. Echo information and rules, BBS adverts, electronic magazines and details of local events are good examples. Once you have in mind exactly what information it is that you want to share with other Fidonet users, you can make a start on setting up the bulletin. The first thing you need to do is to install the software you intend to use, and to supply general configuration details to the program. The procedure is quite different for each of the pieces of software this article covers, and so I will touch on the subject only briefly here. Refer to the documentation for more details. To set up NetMgr, you need to create its configuration file. This is a standard text file which you will create using your favourite FIDONEWS 13-32 Page 3 5 Aug 1996 text editor. The file should be called NETMGR.CFG, and you need to place the following line somewhere in the file: Home
HudsonPath ScanDir If you are using a *.MSG area for your netmail, should simply be the directory containing the *.MSG's. If you are using Squish, directory should be preceded by $; if you are using JAM, precede the area path with !, and if you are using a Hudson message board, should be a # followed by the Hudson message board.
is simply your netmail address. You can give as many Home commands as you have AKA addresses. This is all you need for the initial installation of NetMgr, although you will have to add your bulletins (see later) before the setup is of any use as a document server. is the path to your Hudson message base. This is only necessary if you use a Hudson area for your netmail. FDInt uses a proprietary setup program which is run automatically when you first install the software (it comes as an EXE file). Afterwards you run: FDISETUP at the command line. FDINT takes much of its general configuration from FrontDoor's setup file, so installation takes minimal effort. First, you need to set up the name(s) which FDInt will respond to in its capacity as a document server. You can access this option from the Names and Commands menu, Server Names option. For example, you could have users address their document requests to 'DocServ'. If you wish, bulletins may be split into groups. In this case, group names may be specified using the Groups option on the Names and Commands menu. InfoMail does not automatically interface with FrontDoor or any other mailer, so you will have to spoon feed it with a little more information. Like FDInt, it uses a proprietary setup program to access its configuration. To set up InfoMail, use the following command: INFOMAIL -S The screen which appears contains five fields. You need to specify your netmail directory (the Netmail field): this is the full path to your *.MSG netmail directory. InfoMail can only respond to one name, and this is defined in the 'Name' field. You can leave this as 'InfoMail' or change it to something else such as 'DocServ'. The last mandatory piece of information is the netmail address for InfoMail; this defaults to 2:2502/666 which will hardly be useful for your own system. You would usually put your own primary netmail address in here. The current release of InfoMail does not support multiple AKA's directly; see the documentation for ways to get around this. If you want, you can also specify in the remaining fields global header and footer files for the bulletins InfoMail posts; these will be short sections of text placed at the top and bottom of the body of FIDONEWS 13-32 Page 4 5 Aug 1996 every outgoing bulletin. Once the general configuration has been done, you will want to set up the entry for the bulletin itself. Again, this procedure is different for each piece of software, but before examining the methods in detail, let us sketch out some details of the document record, for example purposes. There should be some way of identifying the bulletin from the user's point of view, as all the software under consideration allows multiple bulletins to be hosted. This would be the document Tag. NetMgr, as you will see, allows documents to be requested in whatever way you please, but both FDInt and InfoMail use a specific name and address in the 'To:' field and a document tag on the subject line, so for the purposes of this article I will standardise on this method, and use the tag 'MyDoc'. Next, we need to know where the text file is, which will contain the actual text of the bulletin. In these examples I will use the filename 'C:\BULLETIN\MYDOC.TXT'. Now for the technical details. Using NetMgr you specify a mask for each bulletin, and the mask contains details of how NetMgr will identify a message as a document request, as well as how it identifies the bulletin. Assuming we want the bulletin to be posted when a user posts a message to 'DocServ' at your address with the subject 'MyDoc', you would add the following to your NETMGR.CFG file: Mask *,*,DocServ,@myaka,MyDoc,* The first, second and sixth fields are the originating name and address, and the attributes of the inbound message, and don't concern us here. The third field is the name we want NetMgr to answer to; it is the equivalent of the global features of FDInt and InfoMail, but has the advantage that you can specify a different user name for each bulletin, as well as a different subject tag. The fourth field is the address which bulletin requests must be sent to; as with the previous field, it is a global setting in FDInt and InfoMail which can vary from bulletin to bulletin in NetMgr. The final field is the document tag; NetMgr will examine the subject line of the message and identify a subject of 'MyDoc' as a request for our document.