Andy said:
I installed Thunderbird and would like to get it setup with some free newsgroup server.
Andy
http://hdc.tamu.edu/Connecting/Usenet_News_Service/Setting_Up_a_Newsgroup_Account_in_Thunderbird.php
Change the server to nntp.aioe.org port 119.
That server requires no username/password and you don't have to
sign up. On the other hand, the server has filters to try to
control spam, and they can make things difficult on occasion.
There is a limit of 25 posts per day (or so).
The filter rules are not spelled out in great detail. If
you have a "symptom" or "unhelpful status message", I can
kinda guess at the meaning for you. AIOE is my backup server
right now.
News servers typically have a page with the details of what
address and port to use.
http://www.aioe.org/
*******
Other servers, you sign up for them. Using an email account
where you can receive any feedback from the administrator.
You can actually operate eternal-september.org without
authentication and without an account. But if you do so,
the newsgroup list is limited to just a handful of groups.
There is an eternal-september.support group, where if you
had to, you could ask questions of the administrator. Because
that admin gets regularly trolled though, don't expect him to
play "tech support" with you - that gets tiring after a while.
To test that un-authenticated access works, and you can reach
the server, the details are here.
http://www.eternal-september.org/index.php?showpage=techinfo
news.eternal-september.org port 119
Port 119 is un-encrypted, and is suitable for a quick test
that you can reach the server. The server is mainly text only,
and is not a "leech site for movies" or anything. He doesn't
have the bandwidth to give away for free, to have people download
multiple DVDs per day. A commercial USENET site and a block account
are available, if you want to do that.
Once you get your userid and password sorted out with E-S...
http://www.eternal-september.org/RegisterNewsAccount.php?language=en
you can then click the "Always Request Authentication" box in
the server setup pane of Thunderbird. The way username/password
works on news servers, seems to be that the client "volunteers"
the information. That is, if the user expects to get connected. You
would think an NNTP server would just prompt for a password
itself, but I think the problem with that idea, is it requires
a persistent TCP/IP connection, and ties up an entry in
the server. That makes it non-scalable. (You could DDOS the
NNTP server, if it worked that way.) In the case of E-S,
the server design actually drops connections quite rapidly,
so connections do not persist for very long even when you're
doing stuff. That means, you store the password in Thunderbird,
and Thunderbird is re-connecting, over and over again, as you work.
(Sending the password, again and again.) You can watch this with
a packet sniffer like Wireshark, if you want to see how the
protocol works with that server.
Tricks like that are necessary, because thousands of users can be
hosted by one server, and it uses up memory for each connection.
The server can only scale, if resource usage is minimal. Even if
it means more packets need be exchanged, per operation carried out.
Perhaps there are 10,000 users who think they are using the server,
but only 1000 connections at a time, as the users are rapidly
time multiplexed. If the connections were perfectly persistent,
there would be 10,000 connections while people are typing, and
it would use ten times as much server memory.
I'd make you a "setup film strip" and post it on Imageshack.us, but
that site has gone to registered access only, and I don't
sign up for crap I don't need. My other image server, has a max
image size, that gets in the way of my fun. So I can no longer
do the illustrated help things I used to.
You never know, there could be a Youtube video with
an example of someone setting up one of those clients.
I'm not a big Youtube user, so I'll leave that hunt to you.
Paul
