response 1 of 41:

Apr 4 11:37 UTC 1993

I'm no expert, but I do know a temporary solution.  Use rn instead
of trn.  It doesn't thread articles at all, and if you only have 5
articles to read, what the heck!

response 3 of 41:

Apr 4 15:02 UTC 1993

If there's some validity to what you said, it implies to me that a great
deal of news is getting lost. I too see hundreds of articles getting threaded,
but a much smaller number available to be selected. I'm puzzled too.

response 5 of 41:

Apr 4 19:49 UTC 1993

For groups that I'm going to read straight through anyway, I usually
turn threading off in trn ("t" toggles it for each group at the top
level).

How do you create a thread file for a newsgroup?  Since the group is
subscribed to, according to trn, does this mean that some information
in the .newsrc is messed up?  I've toggled the threading on a group,
causing it to re-thread, but it still needs to do this every time I
read a group that's toggled as threaded.  Are thread files keep in
some other place?

response 7 of 41:

Apr 5 03:43 UTC 1993

There are systemwide thread files stored in /news/spool/thread.files;
these are maintained by a daemon process (mthreads) and automatically
updated when new articles come in.  When you read a group with
threading turned on, trn first looks for a systemwide thread file for
that group.  If it doesn't find one, or if the thread file is corrupt,
trn forks off a subprocess (tmpthread) to create a thread file
on-the-fly.  This is a the process that prints the "Threading xx
articles..." message.

Depending on how you configure trn and mthreads, you can have
systemwide thread files for all groups, some groups, or no groups.
Since Grex is slow and disk space is easier to add than CPU, I
have systemwide thread files turned on for all newsgroups.  This uses
up about 5%-10% of the news spool space storing thread files, but
means that you shouldn't have to wait for tmpthread to thread a group
every time you go into it.  The systemwide thread files are something
that only the news administrator (i.e., me) can muck with; if they
need to be fixed for a set of groups, it's not something that a
regular user can take care of.

And, to answer Rane's question: In this context, "thread" refers
to a discussion thread, similar to a PicoSpan item.  A Usenet thread
consists of a tree of articles, with the first article in the thread
at the root, and the replies underneath it.  Because of the way
Usenet articles and distribution works, the articles that form
a discussion thread usually arrive at your site jumbled together
with articles from other threads, and sometimes even out of
chronological order.  Instead of reading articles in the order they
were received at your site, like rn does, trn groups articles by
discussion thread and allows you to read only the threads you want,
and read the articles and replies in the order they were posted.
With the many high-traffic groups on Usenet, you may not be interested
in reading all (or even most) of the articles in a group.  Using
trn, you can select threads by Subject: header, and then mark the
unselected threads as read without looking at them.

response 9 of 41:

Apr 5 13:26 UTC 1993

I can confirm that it all works better now. I noticed this problem earlier
and would have notified mju sooner, except that it seemed to happen 
gradually, and I wasn't certain anything was really broken.
I'll spot something like this a lot sooner if it should happen again.

response 11 of 41:

Apr 6 02:34 UTC 1993

Thanks!  I've noticed that some of the groups came up faster and without
the usual count-off.

The explanation of threads was also very helpful.

response 13 of 41:

Apr 10 21:10 UTC 1993

     I have so far not dived into news reading, partially because I don't
want to take up huge amounts of time on the phone.  Keeping up with
conferences here is bad enough.  Is there a way to read news locally, I
mean on my home machine?  I'd like to be able to download a file and use
it on my machine.

response 15 of 41:

Apr 11 23:37 UTC 1993

If you're running Unix, I suppose you can always download the news, but I
don't know if certain groups can be stripped or not.  What's the deal
there, anyway?  Would this be of any help to grex if we just downloaded and
then went offline and later uploaded any posts we had?  I guess what I'm
asking, is if would be good to offer a limited type of server service to
those who can handle reading news on their own machines?  Is it in Grex'
interests?

response 17 of 41:

Apr 15 14:36 UTC 1993

Last night I had a problem posting a followup to an article with 'F' in trn.
(Yes, I am a member.)  I mailed mju a description of what happened, but was
too tired to realize that what I should probably have done is post it here.
So I am doing that now.

I wrote my whole followup and got to the send (which I issued) and then this
happened:

Send, abort, edit, or list? s
newsspool: renouncing setuid due to nonstandard `NEWSPATH' in environment
newsspool: unable to create temporary `/news/spool/in.coming/nspool.a02555'
(Per
mission denied)
/news/bin/inject/injnews: article in /u/srw/dead.article
Article appended to /u/srw/dead.article
A copy may be temporarily found in /u/srw/.article

What did I do wrong?
If something needs to be fixed, can I post it later from .article ?
how?

Apologies to Marc, who'll see this twice.

response 19 of 41:

Apr 16 03:41 UTC 1993

Yes .article was intact. Thanks. It is posted now.

response 21 of 41:

Apr 23 00:45 UTC 1993

Yes, there is something wrong.  /h3 seems to have fragmented itself
to death, so there's no room for new files to be created (even though
there is still free space).  We will have to recreate the filesystem
before news can restart.  I'll see about doing it tonight.

response 23 of 41:

Apr 28 00:35 UTC 1993

I'm still just starting to learn about trn, & the man is so hideously
long & slow - so I apologize for a dumb question:  Here I am, reading
along a thread.  I finish an item and go on to the next & the next, &
suddenly realize I need to reread the first one.  How do I get back to
it?  I don't think I know its item #, but I may just not have looked in
the right place - but even if I do, I don't know how to use it.  The
thread selection screen just tells me there are no previous unread items.