Help with tin

BillySastard89 · May 18, 2011

Hey everyone. First off, I'm pretty new to Unix, and only know some basic stuff. Anyways, I installed tin, and I have no ideas what variables to add where. I tried adding NNTPSERVER=whatever and export NNTPSERVER to .profile, and when I tried starting tin with tin -r it didn't work. I'm fairly certain I'm doing this wrong, and any help is greatly appreciated.

Beastie · May 18, 2011

.profile is for the Bourne shell. Is that what you're using? If you're using a C shell, you should use .cshrc instead.

Code:

setenv NNTPSERVER whatever

BillySastard89 · May 18, 2011

I'm using the shell that comes with FreeBSD by default. Also sorry about the improper formatting :\

Beastie · May 18, 2011

What does
% echo $SHELL
say?

BillySastard89 · May 19, 2011

Code:

/bin/csh

I'm assuming that's the C shell?

BillySastard89 · May 19, 2011

ok I added the variable:

Code:

setenv NNTPSERVER us.blocknews.net

Then I added my username and password, then this came up:

Code:

Server Expects Authentication.
Authorized for user: myusername

Then it stopped at that. Did I forget to add something?

BillySastard89 · May 19, 2011

Oh, also forgot to mention that I started tin with

Code:

tin -r

fmw · May 20, 2011

Did you create a .newsauth file in your home directory?

the format for that file is:

Code:

$nntpserver $password $username

(mind the order of the entries)

Don't forget to set the permissions on that file properly:

Code:

chmod 600 .newsauth

BillySastard89 · May 21, 2011

Thank you, I will try that now

and what file do I set the permissions in? Sorry, like I said I'm pretty much brand new to Unix.

fmw · May 24, 2011

Hi,
this is just a command you enter in your home directory. Simply put, the permissions are stored in the file system itself, not in a separate file.

tin will work without this, but you'd get a complaint about insecure permissions for that file.

To explain this a bit further, these 3 digits represent the permissions for User (=you), Group (you can make up groups of users which will be allowed to use the same files, and some programs need that as well) and Others (=everyone else), in this order.

The possible values are 4 for read, 2 for write and 1 for execute permissions. These are added, so 600 means the file can be read and written only by you, but not by any other users.

Take a look at the manual page for chmod if you want to know more:

Code:

 man chmod

Hope I didn't confuse you too much

Beastie · May 24, 2011

The Handbook has a page for virtually anything: Chapter 3 UNIX Basics - Permissions.

BillySastard89 · Jun 16, 2011

Hey all, sorry it took so long for me to answer back. Well, I tried adding that info to .newsauth, and it still doing the same thing: it just says i'm authorized, then sits there doing nothing. Any ideas?