Low-Level Usenet News Access

At the lynx menu, press 'g' to go to. Type in "telnet://news.vcn.bc.ca:119/" without the quotes. You will be greeted with

200 news.vcn.bc.ca InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.3.2 ready (posting ok).

Possible commands are:

authinfo starttls article body date group head help
ihave last list listgroup mode newgroups newnews
next post slave stat xgtitle xhdr xover xpat xpath

Note the "help" command.

In a healthy newsgroup such as vcn.test, if you type "group vcn.test", you will get this:

group vcn.test
211 8 401 436 vcn.test

The first number is the success/failure code. 200+ means no error. 400+ means there is an error, sort of like HTTP's 404 error. The second number is estimate of how many articles are available. The third and fourth numbers are the article numbers. All the numbers must be positive.

You can view the article by the command "article 436"

article 436
220 436 <[email protected]> article
Path: news.vcn.bc.ca!not-for-mail
From: Bryan Ho 
Newsgroups: vcn.test
Subject: testing
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 03:24:08 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: Vancouver Community Network
Lines: 1
Sender: Bryan Ho 
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: vcn.bc.ca
X-Trace: luna.vcn.bc.ca 1008645848 29515 207.102.64.2 (18 Dec 2001 03:24:08 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: [email protected]
NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001 03:24:08 +0000 (UTC)
User-Agent: tin/1.4.5-20010409 ("One More Nightmare") (UNIX) (SunOS/5.8 (sun4u))
Xref: news.vcn.bc.ca vcn.test:436

test
.

Here is an example of a corrupted group.

group alt.comp.freeware
211 6639 1 -312092498 alt.comp.freeware

Can we fix this corruption? Yes, but the usenet news system is extremely complicated and it would require too much effort to do so for just one or two newsgroups.