Methods for posting to umd.edu newsgroups remotely

			Sudarshan S. Chawathe

			      2004-09-09

I describe below three methods for posting articles to UMD newsgroups,
such as the class newsgroup csd.cmsc424.0201, that do not permit
posting from non-UMD hosts.  The methods are listed in order of
increasing complexity, though they are all quite simple.  

Note that you need the following only for posting messages.  You
should be able to read messages in all news.umd.edu newsgroups by
simply setting up your news reader to use news.umd.edu as the NNTP
server.  On the other hand, I do encourage everyone to post on the
newsgroup, so setting up a read-only environment wouldn't be a good
idea. 

We will assume that you are logged into a machine called crowbar
(e.g., your PC at home, your laptop at a Starbucks) that is outside
the umd.edu domain.


* Method 1: Web access

Please follow the instructions on the linuxlab Web page to access a
very nice Web interface to the CS newsgroups:

   http://queasy.csic.umd.edu/

This method currently works only for CS newsgroups.  Further, this
method uses a newly added and lightly tested setup, so please treat it
as a beta version.


* Method 2: remote login

Use some form of ssh to log in from crowbar to dc.umd.edu (or
linuxlab.csic.umd.edu), and run a text-based news program (e.g., trn
or rn) on the DC or linuxlab machine.  If you are running GNU/linux,
Mac OS X, or some other Unix variant on crowbar, you can simply use
the 'ssh' command at the shell prompt:

   ssh -l <username> dc.umd.edu

where <username> is your *Detective Cluster* user name. If you are
using Microsoft Windows, you can try the PuTTY program or some other
ssh client.


* Method 3: ssh tunneling

Use the following command on crowbar, replacing <username> with your
user name for the *Detective Cluster* machines.

   ssh -l<username> -L 119:news.umd.edu:119 dc.umd.edu

(The above assumes the OpenSSH ssh client on a Unix-like environment.
For other ssh clients, you will need to figure out how to set up port
forwarding that is analogous to the above.)  Then, set up your local
(on crowbar) newsreader to use "localhost" (or 127.0.0.1) as the NNTP
server.  You should be able to read and post to all news.umd.edu
newsgroups using this setup.  Note that this arrangement will work
only as long as the ssh session initiated by the above command remains
active.


If none of the above work, get in touch with Nicholas and me.