Chris Reich

Introduction
If you are a regular reader of a newsgroup, you can use MPNews to host your own full archive of all the messages. You can download the messages from as many other news servers as you want, giving you very high completion, and you are in control over how long the messages will stay available for. For most text-only newsgroups, you can effectively keep a permanent archive of every message in the group.

By keeping your own archive with MPNews, you can make sure you will always have access to all the messages you want, either in your newsreader or over the web. Plus, you can use all the powerful features of MPNews such as automatic filtering to block unwanted messages and access control to stop anyone else accessing your archive.

Downloading messages
To get the messages from your favourite newsgroups into your MPNews server, you need to set up a "pull feed" (sometimes known as a "suck feed"). This periodically checks another news server for any new messages in the newsgroups you are interested in and downloads them to your own server. You can set up as many pull feeds as you want to merge the messages from multiple servers and improve your completion rate.

To set up a pull feed, open the MPNews administration and go to the "News feeds" item. Click on the "Add New Feed" link to create a new feed.

On the screen that appears, enter the address of the news server to download messages from, e.g. news.isp.com and, if required, the username and password to use when connecting to that server. Click Save to create the feed, then click on the "Edit Pull Feed" link next to the new feed to select what newsgroups should be downloaded.

A screen will now appear containing a list of newsgroups that are offered by the other server. This may take some time to download, so please be patient. Select a newsgroup to download by checking the box next to it.

You can also change how messages will be downloaded by going to the "Connections" area of this screen. By default, MPNews will use up to three connections to the server to download messages and will check for new messages every 60 minutes. You can change these settings to use more connections if the server allows it, or check for new messages more frequently.

In the "Feed type" area, you can change how MPNews handles each new message it finds. By default, it will download the entire message. You can change this to only download the header information, then download the rest of the message the first time it is read. This allows MPNews to get a full list of messages in the newsgroup more quickly and using less bandwidth, but means there will be a delay between selecting a message to read in a newsreader and the message being available while MPNews downloads the rest of the message. Unless you often do not read the majority of messages, it is generally better to leave this on the default setting to download the entire message.

Finally, in the "Virtual servers" area, you can select which of the MPNews virtual servers the newsgroups being downloaded through this pull feed should be visible in. You can normally just select your one and only virtual server from the list, and click on OK.

Posting new messages
The pull feed you now have set up will handle downloading messages from the Internet and making them available for you to read, but what if you want to post new messages of your own? As it stands, any new messages you post will just stay on your own server and won't be available to anyone else.

To get MPNews to send your own messages back to the servers you are downloading messages from, you need to set up the "push feed" part of the news feed. In the list of news feeds, click on the "Edit Push Feed" link next to your news feed.

Unless you have an agreement with the company running the news server you are downloading messages from to allow you to transfer messages from your server to theirs, you will need to get MPNews to pretend to be a normal newsreader sending its own messages by selecting the "POST" push method at the top of this screen.

Finally, enter the names of the newsgroups that you want to send back to the server in the "Send messages posted to the newsgroups" box. Any new messages you post to a newsgroup that is listed here will automatically be sent on to the other news server. You can list individual newsgroups by separating their names with commas, e.g. news.group.1,news.group.2, or by using a "wildmat" pattern such as news.group.*.

Restricting access
The default access control settings supplied with MPNews mean that anyone on the Internet can access your server. Now that you are running a fully functional newsgroup archive, you have a valuable resource that others may try to take advantage of. To prevent this, you need to restrict access to your server by setting up a username for you and anyone else you want to give access to.