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

> @"JuvenalUrbino"#p10524 Would you be interested in something like that? Wouldn't this detract a bit from the board itself? (Otherwise, go for it!)

@"rvp"#p10529 If so, news/nntp at least would be much more "*nixy".

@"rvp"#p10529 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"#p10530 If so, news/nntp at least would be much more "*nixy". > @"JuvenalUrbino"#p10532 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"#p10535 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"#p10524 Would you be interested in something like that? I would 👍️ > @"rvp"#p10529 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"#p10540 ...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](https://tilde.club/wiki/usenet-news.html). 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"#p10566 Stay tuned. My patience gene has a severe defect... :-/ ...but I'll try really hard! ------ > @"JuvenalUrbino"#p10566 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 # █ ``` But after a while, I couldn't get the needed mips-gcc built any more... :-/

idea: hosting a unitedbsd newsgroup

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?

rvp

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

PN & RPN look weird at first, but, they're very easy to understand if you think of the operators as pure functions. For example:

mul(5, 4)			# * 5 4 => 20
add(3, 1)			# + 3 1 => 4
mul(add(2, 3), add(3, 1))	# * + 2 3 + 3 1 => 20

Unfortunately, it isn't taught like that. Even CS students learn it like pushing and popping things off the stack. Terrible...

yeti

rvp Even CS students learn it like pushing and popping things off the stack. Terrible...

That was different when I was in the LSPC (Large Student/Professor Collider). Maybe because IT stuff still was fairly new and just began to mutate from a math subtopic to undercover math with just a different name.

What's the difference between math students and CS students? As a math student you know you are learning math.

rvp

yeti What's the difference between math students and CS students?

Any country with Democracy in its name isn't one--it's very likely a dictatorship (DPRK). Similarly, any discipline with Science in its title isn't: Political Science, Social Science, Computer Science...

JuvenalUrbino

rvp Any country with Democracy in its name isn't one--it's very likely a dictatorship (DPRK).

Or People's Democratic Republic of the Congo, essentially a one-party dominant system¹. Many years ago I played the role of a Congolese delegate in UN SPECPOL at NHSMUN. I learned a lot about the misuse of political buzzwords.

¹ (no intention to hurt the sensitivity of potential readers here)

yeti

JuvenalUrbino Luckily alt.unitedbsd is a demoncratic group. \o/

bsduck

JuvenalUrbino Many years ago I played the role of a Congolese delegate in UN SPECPOL at NHSMUN.

What a coincidence. I have also been a Congolese delegate at a local MUN!

JuvenalUrbino

yeti and the best form a of a democratic group: a participatory one.

yeti

JuvenalUrbino

„Es gibt nichts Gutes,
außer man tut es.“
― Erich Kästner

yeti

It looks like if retrobsd.ddns.net is unreachable or switched off in my GNUS all works as expected, while if retrobsd.ddns.net is reachable, GNUS often hangs and I need to ^G and restart looking for new news sometimes even multiple times.

I'm reading retrobsd.ddns.net, a local imap: and three other nntp: sources with GNUS.

If it works for reliably you, how does your config for retrobsd.ddns.net look?

JuvenalUrbino

yeti It looks like if retrobsd.ddns.net is unreachable or switched off

Look like I had to restart INN after upgrading to pkgsrc-2022Q1 😉

yeti GNUS often hangs and I need to ^G and restart looking for new news sometimes even multiple times.

I suppose that's due to some configuration setting on my side. Finding reliable sources on INN/NNTP is extremely hard, especially with regard to private servers (not relayed with Usenet peers). I have therefore no example to compare to, which, considering how complex INN configuration is, and my relative lack of competence on the protocol, represents quite a downside.

Edit: on slrn I only experience hangs while posting a reply after a certain idle time. I remember the used to happen on the orbitalfox.eu newsserver, which was another local community. It's probably something in the default inn.conf.

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