Notes on Trumpet ---------------- Trumpet is an NNTP newsreader for DOS. It supports both class 1 (Ethernet) and class 6 (SLIP) packet drivers. There are 4 versions in the archive; the one for an 8086 or 80286 with a packet driver is NEWS.EXE. You need to have the packet driver set up and connection established before you set up Trumpet. The first time you run Trumpet, a setup screen will appear. Some fields are optional. Set NNTP host and SMTP host to the names of your NNTP and SMTP servers as given to you. Site name is the part of your email address after the "@". For example, my email address is "jhayes@buckeyeweb.com", so I would put "buckeyeweb.com" for the site name. You can leave Organization blank. User name is the user name assigned by your provider, the part of your email address before the "@", e.g., "jhayes" (for me). Full name is your (human) name. Sigfile name is optional and can be left blank. For most providers, leave NNTP username and NNTP password blank. If your provider requires a separate username and password for NNTP, put them in. (For example, if you use Supernews for news.) Be careful typing the password as it will not echo. If you have static IP, fill in your machine's IP address where indicated. If you have dynamic IP, make IP address blank. For Net mask, fill in your provider's netmask, usually 255.255.255.0, but sometimes 255.255.0.0. Set Gateway to your gateway's IP address. If your gateway is dynamic, make Gateway blank. Fill in DNS server with your nameserver's IP address. For Time server, either give your timeserver's IP address (given to you by your ISP) or just put your gateway's IP address again. It doesn't really matter, and it's OK to make it blank. Leave Domain blank to speed up DNS queries. After you select "OK" in the Setup box, Trumpet will connect to your NNTP server. If the server refuses the connection, you can select the Setup option in the Special menu to change your settings. After the connection is established, you will be asked "Do you wish to subscribe to all groups?" If you say yes, Trumpet will download the group list from the server. If your site carries a lot of groups (more than about 2000), you *must* say no. Trumpet will crash if it runs out of memory downloading the group list. If Trumpet bombs, it won't close the NNTP connection; you'll have to close the SLIP or PPP link and reopen before you try again. Instead of having Trumpet download the group list from the server and saving it in NEWS.INI, which won't work if there are too many groups, you need to exit Trumpet and create NEWS.INI manually. Page 13 of NEWSDOC.TXT describes the format. Basically, you put a line in NEWS.INI for each group you want to subscribe to that looks like this: a.group.name Y 1 The group name is at the left margin, as shown. For example, if I wanted to subscribe to comp.sys.tandy, news.newusers.questions, and news.announce, I would put this in my NEWS.INI: comp.sys.tandy Y 1 news.announce Y 1 news.newusers.questions Y 1 (You should probably keep the groups in alphabetical order.) Once you have NEWS.INI set up, you can run NEWS.EXE again and read news. If your site carries a lot of groups, you can't use the Subscribe option in Trumpet. If you try to Subscribe to a new group that way, Trumpet will crash. Instead, edit your NEWS.INI file to add the group you want. Unsubscribe normally using the menu option. You need to have some alternate way of finding out what newsgroups your site carries, other than querying the server. See if your provider has a file available by ftp that lists the groups they have. If your provider doesn't have such a file available, it is possible to obtain a list via telnet; see file cutcp-b.txt in this directory. To deal with dynamic IP in Trumpet, create a batch file RUNNEWS.BAT consisting of a single line like this: news -myip=%IP% Or: news -myip=%IP% -gateway=%REMIP% That will cause Trumpet to get your IP address and (if necessary) your gateway's IP address from the IP and REMIP environment variables. After creating the batch file, type RUNNEWS at the DOS prompt to run the newsreader. If you make a mistake while setting up Trumpet, you can generally correct it using the Setup option in the Special menu. If Trumpet won't start at all, delete NEWS.PRM and start over with a fresh copy from the archive. Watch the free memory display on the top right of the screen, next to the time. The list of unread postings in a group and the posting you're reading have to fit in that space. Trumpet won't crash if there are too many posts in a group or too large a post, though; you just get what fits.