Multiple Host Support for wcNews

(since 5.4.449.4)

I should had not done this, but you can blame "sean" for making poke my nose into wcnews. That was one utility I have not looked at in detail until now.

The #1 request for wcnews was multiple host support.

My original solution was to offer IGATE.EXE which is something I wrote before MSI wrote wcNEWS.EXE. I knew wcNews did not offer the features in IGATE, namely, 1 important feature:

reply reference support, which is "mail thread support" using the news RFC standard.

This is not possible with wcNews. In others, WILDCAT! is not "compliant" with RFC News article in the area of "replies".

So my offering would of been to replace wcNews with Igate by getting rid of wcnews and renaming igate to wcNews.

But there was a design snag!

For the reply reference support to work, igate requires the usage and creation of external "mail index files" for each news conference. This allowed for the ability to create the "reply thread" by checking the index to see if a new article was a "reply" or "new message". This allowed IGATE to offer %100 RFC compliant support to Wildcat!.

Because of this "external" file dependency, the idea was to wait until WINS2000 where we can built-in the index files into wildcat and make it all natural. The packer would have to support the index files, the mail creation editors would have to be smarter in knowing about "news articles", etc.

Anyway, for now, I can add the "Multiple Host" to wcNews.

I have added the following new command line option to wcNews:

/host:name Specific host to be processed. Default is primary host.

In order to make this work, you will need to create the host in WCCONFIG|NETWORKS, where the DOMAIN NAME is the nntp server domain name. You will ALSO be required to use a different SPOOL PATH other than the default spool spath. This is not so much important for wcMAIL IMPORTING news BAG files created by WCNEWS, wcMAIL doesn't really care where the spool spath is at during wcmail news import, but for wcMAIL EXPORTING news mail it is important that the spool path be different from any other HOST.

This will allow wcNEWS to pick up the right *.CMD/*.DAT/*.XQT (created by WCMAIL) to send the proper files to the proper host.

Authentication

If your news server requires authentication use the switches

/auth:username /pwd:password

With these new switches, for sysops who are connecting to multiple news hosts and are using a copy wcnews.cfg logic, no need to have multiple wcnews.cfg anymore. They can do something like this in their news events.

wcnews /host:newshost1
wcnews /host:newshost2 /auth:userid /pwd:password
wcnews /host:newshost3

If you begin to use these methods, you need to do one thing first:
Copy/merge all the various newsgroups low=,high= lines in the *.cfg files into the single wcnews.cfg files.