No News Is No News

Thursday, 10 April 1997

I generally read my Usenet news at work, since Crossover has a news server, and I like reading news that's being served from the other end of an Ethernet cable, instead of over a 28.8 kbd noisy phone connection. The only problem is that our server sucks. It's a freeware model with a few flaws that aren't going to be fixed; we'd have to upgrade to the commercial version for that. In particular, the server crashes everytime some asshole takes it into his head to crosspost something to several hundred newsgroups. Then the server has to spend a few days struggling to catch up on the news it missed while we were manually filtering out the spam. We've spent the past month or so about 80 hours behind on our news. Yuck.

So, a couple of days ago, we installed a new server, Microsoft Exchange. Ever since that's been up and running, I haven't been able to read news. YA-NewsWatcher reports that Exchange is having trouble interpreting the XHDR command. I don't even know what that command does (it's not part of the RFC that defines the original NNTP standard, and I haven't been able to find out what RFC it is defined in); I think it has something to do with getting all of the message headers for a particular newsgroup. Anyway, I wound up downloading MT-NewsWatcher, to see if that would work, and found that I like it even more than YA-NewsWatcher. I was able to read one group's worth of news with MT, and then started having the same problem when I tried reading a second group. I gave up in disgust.

Today, I installed Microsoft Mail and News, a client that comes with Internet Explorer. I figured that Microsoft's client ought to be able to get along with Microsoft's server. Unfortunately, by that time the server had crashed, and our sysadmin's out today, so nobody's been able to get it running again. I could telnet into Interport, and use trn to read news off their server, but I tried that yesterday, and it's just too slow and frustrating.

But speaking of Usenet, Tuesday was the first rec.arts.sf.fandom New York-area get-together, organized by Gary Farber, who spends so much time on Usenet that I'm amazed he has time to do anything else. It was at d.b.a. (It's a measure of the degree to which computers have warped my brain that I initially typed that as "a.d.b" Sure, DBA is a well-known abbreviation, but so is ADB among the more technical Mac users, so neither TLA has that sense of unfamiliarity that would make the other easier for me to remember.) I'd probably like the meeting place a lot better if I drank, since it's a bar with a wide variety of beers, but the company was good, and the sodas were about average restaurant price (US$1.50), so I didn't suffer. Lisa insists that I told her there would be food served at the bar, despite my not having said so, and Gary's e-mail having explicitly said that d.b.a. doesn't serve food. (They don't mind if people order in, so we phoned a nearby Indian place.)