Today I thought about self-hosting a NNTP newsgroup for the UnitedBSD community. The idea comes from a friend offering a NNTP gateway for their social news aggregator, alias sic.pm , and was also inspired by the tildeverse's newsserver. Would you be interested in something like that?

JuvenalUrbino Would you be interested in something like that? Wouldn't this detract a bit from the board itself? (Otherwise, go for it!)

rvp If so, news/nntp at least would be much more "*nixy".

rvp my past experience suggests that two or more different means of communication for a given topic are more likely to be complementary than mutually exclusive. More verbosely, I think a new platform will only drive away people from a former one if it provides a better replacement for what the former stands for. And that's not the case. I think different users are inherently attracted by different platforms and while you may still see the very adamant ones being omnipresent, many more people will alternatively prefer forums, mailing lists/newsgroups, irc/matrix/telegram, twitter/mastodon, etc... so, a better phrased out question for this thread would be: "is there actually anybody interested in such a thing, to justify the creation of a newsgroup for people hanging around UnitedBSD?" :3

yeti If so, news/nntp at least would be much more "*nixy". JuvenalUrbino two or more different means of communication for a given topic are more likely to be complementary than mutually exclusive. Complementarity is fine, but, the idea still feels kinda meta to me: a discussion group for a discussion board. 😉 (A newsgroup is OK with me: both alpine and lynx do nntp just fine.)

rvp a discussion group for a discussion board Fair point; let's say I just like to tinker and play around with old protocols and smolnet, then 😆 Seriously speaking, I wanted to provide an alternative for occasions like: a system with significant resource restraints (i386, macppc, arm/mips boards), a system with no access to a javascript-enabled browser or a browser with up to date SSL support a fresh installation or a system with broken X a headless server, accessed though a terminal from which one may directly cut from, and past text to. slow internet speed, limited bandwidth, firewall blocking http.

...but, but, but how will we translate the rabbit hunt to plaintext? Ok... jokes aside... let's try it!!

JuvenalUrbino Would you be interested in something like that? I would 👍️ rvp Wouldn't this detract a bit from the board itself? Possibly, but I would probably use it as a complementary playground to interact with the folks here through text only interfaces. yeti ...but, but, but how will we translate the rabbit hunt to plaintext? ......., There's probably already an emacs command for that. Tried C-x M-c M-rabbithunttoplaintext ?

I concurred with another forum member that it may actually turn out a good idea to host such *bsd group on tildeverse's newsserver . I opened a thread on tilde.meta to discuss the creation of such a group. The rationale resides in the widespread interest in BSD amid the community, as well as the fact many tildes run on *BSD. In the meantime, while we wait for a reply, I'll also look into how to setup a newsserver with INN. Few months ago I had got a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB, and now I've finally found the time to install NetBSD/aarch64 on it, with a ZFS storage partition. I had to update the firmware included in the default ISO to get it to boot. Yesterday I reserved the retrobsd.ddns.net dyndns domain. This may either become our host or a mirror. Stay tuned.

JuvenalUrbino Stay tuned. My patience gene has a severe defect... :-/ ...but I'll try really hard! JuvenalUrbino Yesterday I reserved the retrobsd.ddns.net dyndns domain. Wait... I had RetroBSD for some experiments on a PIC32... 2.11 BSD Unix for PIC32, revision G188 build 1: Compiled 2014-12-31 by yeti@darkstar: /opt/retrobsd.git_gcc-4.8.1/sys/pic32/duinomite cpu: 795F512H 80 MHz, bus 80 MHz oscillator: HS crystal, PLL div 1:2 mult x20 console: ttyUSB0 (5,0) sd0: port SPI3, select pin D5 sd0: type II, size 1966080 kbytes, speed 13 Mbit/sec phys mem = 128 kbytes user mem = 96 kbytes root dev = rd0a (0,1) root size = 102400 kbytes swap dev = rd0b (0,2) swap size = 2048 kbytes /dev/rd0a: 633 files, 10172 used, 91827 free Starting daemons: update cron 2.11 BSD UNIX (pic32) (console) login: root Password: Welcome to RetroBSD! erase, kill ^U, intr ^C # █ if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } But after a while, I couldn't get the needed mips-gcc built any more... :-/

idea: hosting a unitedbsd newsgroup

pfr

JuvenalUrbino
little typo:

- getting things ready
[...]
$ for d in drafts macros misc
> do mdkir -p ~/news/${d}
> done

Solution:
alias mdkir="mkdir" 😆

Also, I'm clearly doing something wrong

~ $ export NNTPSERVER=news://retrobsd.ddns.net
~ $ slrn --create
slrn 1.0.3

Loading /usr/pkg/share/slrn/slang/slrn.sl
Reading startup file /home/dave/.slrnrc.***Warning: Unable to find a unique fully-qualified host name.
            slrn will not generate any Message-IDs.
            Please note that the "hostname" setting does not affect this;
            see the "slrn reference manual" for details.

Using newsrc file /home/dave/.jnewsrc for server news://retrobsd.ddns.net.
Connecting to host retrobsd.ddns.net ...
Unable to make connection. Giving up.

Run-Time Error
slrn fatal error:
Failed to initialize server.

JuvenalUrbino

pfr Solution:
alias mdkir="mkdir" 😆

Ty 🙂
...mdkir the new ultimate Unix swiss knife to make directories

pfr Also, I'm clearly doing something wrong

Specify a domainname in your /etc/rc.conf to get rid of the first warning; also put:

127.0.1.1 hostname.yourdomain.tld hostname

in /etc/hosts, and/or make sure /etc/resolv.conf has a domain entry.

As for connectivity error, I think you just into a network connection downtime; trying pinging / reaching website next time to verify so.

pfr

JuvenalUrbino

I think it must have been down because I was able to reach news.tilde.club. Although I can't post for some reason. Does it require auth settings?

Also, I just wonder about setting the environment variable export NNTPSERVER=news://retrobsd.ddns.net in .profile.. what if I want to access other servers (news.tilde.club for eg). Can I set more than one here?

When I try to join news.tilde.club with slrn -h news://news.tilde.club:119 I get an empty buffer. I have to export the NNTPserver first then run slrn --create

JuvenalUrbino

Well, looks lime SD failed me....:/

JuvenalUrbino

JuvenalUrbino Well, looks lime SD failed me....:/

Unfortunately, @pfr, it is gone for a while and I need to restore it as I find the time. I only brought back the site for the moment. I really hate SDs: one unclean shutdown while writing stuff was already enough to compromise it irremediably.

I'll look into booting from an external drive, it should be feasible as far as I know.

As I lack a backup of the last week, my recent exchange with @yeti on the newsgroup however, is gone for real...

JuvenalUrbino

JuvenalUrbino I'll look into booting from an external drive, it should be feasible as far as I know.

@pfr the newsserver has been brought back. You might want to try to connect and see if you can post; Let me know if you have any problem

pfr

JuvenalUrbino
Damn. Oh well, I'll catch you on irc then I suppose.

Any ideas about why I can't post to news.tilde.club?

JuvenalUrbino

pfr Any ideas about why I can't post to news.tilde.club?

Honestly no, it should be opened for posting to anybody. What sort of error are you getting?

pfr

JuvenalUrbino
Well this is embarrassing...

gpg: can't open '/home/dave/.msmtp-password.gpg': No such file or directory
gpg: decrypt_message failed: No such file or directory
msmtp: cannot read output of 'gpg2 --no-tty -q -d ~/.msmtp-password.gpg'
Command /usr/pkg/bin/msmtp -t returned exit status 78.  Press RETURN.

Need help setting up msmtp 😅

JuvenalUrbino

pfr by pressing 'r' you're writing a direct reply (mail) to parent poster. What you want instead is pressing 'f' to follow-up (nntp) on the thread.

rvp

oui There's probably already an emacs command for that

There is an actual M-x butterfly in emacs.

"Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent text-editor"
— Ancient Vim proverb

pfr

rvp funny but embarrassing, when I first started out on my *nix journey many moons ago, I read this somewhere and for a while I genuinely believed emacs was an operating system. To this day I've never used emacs and I have no intention to.

oui

rvp

nia Now do it with /dev/mem.

Never done a live system. Patched more than a few binaries using the power of conv=notrunc (much quicker than re-linking sometimes).

JuvenalUrbino How would an aploid thread look like were it to undergo meiosis instead?

There would be 3 additional threads instead of just one.

pfr I genuinely believed emacs was an operating system.

Emacs isn't an OS: it actually is a full-blown lisp interpreter, with the basic editing functions itself written in lisp. Which results in flexibility and customizability like you wouldn't believe. Emacs has fans.

This is from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning... Was the Command Line:

In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

rvp

oui With all due respect to the xkcd author: there's no need to use cats or butterflies to flip bits when they have dd at hand:

flipbit.sh

#!/bin/sh
#
# Toggle bit $1 of byte at offset $2 in file $3.

set -eu -o pipefail

me=${0##*/}
N=${1:?"$me: bit position reqd."}	# 0-indexed
O=${2:?"$me: byte offset reqd."}	#     "
F=${3:?"$me: input file reqd."}

die() {
	echo >&2 "$me: $*"; exit 1
}

# check range. bitops on bytes are OK even if underlying
# data-type is signed: long/intmax_t
[ $N -ge 0 -a $N -le 7 ] || die "$N: not in range (0-7)"
isset() {
	return $(( !(($1 & (1<<$2)) >> $2) ))
}
bitclr() {
	echo $(( $1 & ~(1<<$2) ))
}
bitset() {
	echo $(( $1 | (1<<$2) ))
}

B=$(dd if="$F" bs=1 count=1 skip=$O 2>/dev/null | hexdump -e '"%u"') ||
	die "$F: read failed"
B=$(isset $B $N && bitclr $B $N || bitset $B $N)
B=$(printf '\\%03o' $B)			# make octal fmt. spec.
printf "$B" | dd of=$F bs=1 count=1 seek=$O conv=notrunc 2>/dev/null ||
	die "$F: write failed"

$ echo 'This is: B' > 1.txt; cat 1.txt
This is: B
$ ./flipbit.sh 0 9 1.txt; cat 1.txt
This is: C
$ ./flipbit.sh 5 9 1.txt; cat 1.txt
This is: c
$ ./flipbit.sh 0 9 1.txt; cat 1.txt
This is: b
$ ./flipbit.sh 5 9 1.txt; cat 1.txt 
This is: B
$

nettester

oui I know i am somewhat late but i think this needs to be corrected. Real programmers use geany (or mcedit if they are to lazy to move away from the terminal) because they aren't stuck in the frickin 80's...

No, joking aside, text editor wars are the most silly thing to ever show up on the internet. Everyone should use whatever they think to get the most productivity from.

yeti

https://xkcd.com/1172/

nia

rvp Now do it with /dev/mem. 😅

yeti

nia Without superpowers?

...and maybe that topic diversion already is worth a thread mitosis?

JuvenalUrbino

yeti ...and maybe that topic diversion already is worth a thread mitosis?

How would an aploid thread look like were it to undergo meiosis instead?

pfr

rvp I really must dive into lisp. While I dont have much desire to learn emacs (but maybe oneday) I do appreciate many other lisp programs. stumpwm being one of them, another ratpoisen-like wm, similar to the one I'm using. I'm only just getting my head around C and starting to be comfortable with sh. Lisp is next on my list, followed by rust and go

yeti

pfr

https://ftp.fau.de/fosdem/2020/AW1.125/lispeverywhere.webm
https://ftp.fau.de/fosdem/2020/AW1.125/lispeverywhere.mp4

I'd give our shitty mixedfix notation the worst score of all the ways to write stuff. Unluckily we have been brainwashed with that ugly garbage heap of prefix, postfix, infix, different binding power, different binding power correcting parentheses, superscript, subscript and whatnot for enough time to make it really sticky in our brains. Forth and Lisp look like the most beautiful languages on earth to me but that brainwashing seems to win so far. :-(

As lispy WM I liked Sawfish.

I wonder how kids educated in RPN or PN from the start would perform in these languages.

The world different see they would?

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