URI: 

       Title: Gentoo port of the week: slrn
       Author: Solène
       Date: 08 November 2017
       Tags: gentoo portoftheweek
       Description: 
       
       ## Introduction
       
       Hello,
       
       Today I will speak about **slrn**, a nntp client. I'm using it to
       fetch mailing lists I'm following (without necesserarly subscribing to
       them) and read it offline. I'll speak about using nntp to read
       news-groups, I'm not sure but in a more general way nntp is used to
       access *usenet*. I'm not sure to know what *usenet* is, so we will
       stick here by connecting to mailing-list archives offered by
       **gmane.org** (which offers access to mailing-lists and newsgroups
       through nntp).
       
       Long story short, recently I moved and now I have a very poor DSL
       connection. Plus I'm often moving by train with nearly no 4G/LTE
       support during the trip. I'm going to write about getting things done
       offline and about reducing bandwith usage. This is a really
       interesting topic in our hyper-connected world.
       
       So, back to **slrn**, I want to be able to fetch lot of news and read
       it later. Every nntp client I tried were getting the articles list (in
       nntp, an article = a mail, a forum = mailing list) and then it
       download each article when we want to read it. Some can cache the
       result when you fetch an article, so if you want to read it later it
       is already fetched. While **slrn** doesn't support caching at all, it
       comes with the utility **slrnpull** which will create a local copy of
       forums you want, and **slrn** can be configured to fetch data from
       there. slrnpull need to be configured to tell it what to fetch, what
       to keep etc... and a cron will start it sometimes to fetch the new
       articles.
       
       ## Configuration 
       
       The following configuration is made to be simple to use, it runs with
       your regular user. This is for gentoo, maybe some another system would
       provide a dedicated user and everything pre-configured.
       
       Create the folder for **slrnpull** and change the owner:
       
           $ sudo mkdir /var/spool/slrnpull
           $ sudo chown user /var/spool/slrnpull
       
       **slrnpull** configuration file must be placed in the folder it will
       use. So edit **/var/spool/slrnpull/slrnpull.conf** as you want, my
       configuration file is following.
       
           default 200 45 0
           # indicates a default value of 20 articles to be retrieved from the
       server and
           # that such an article will expire after 14 days.
dataswamp.org:70 /~solene/article-gentoo-portoftheweek-slrn:57: port field too long