1This file concerns a setup of slrn that is suitable for multiple users. 2 3The installation instructions given in this file provide information about 4setting up slrn with defaults that are global to all users. These defaults 5include such information as the name of the organization and the hostname. 6In addition, only one newsgroup description file is needed instead of one 7per user. 8 9The files that provide such "global" information are put in 10 SYSCONFDIR/slrn.rc : global initialization file and 11 DATADIR/slrn/newsgroups.dsc : newsgroup description file. 12The values of SYSCONFDIR and DATADIR can be set when building slrn 13(--sysconfdir and --datadir options of ./configure). 14 15On my system, the global slrn.rc file simply contains the two lines: 16 17 set hostname space.mit.edu 18 set organization "Center for Space Research" 19 20which will appear in the appropriate headers when a user posts a message. In 21addition to specifying these quantities in the slrn.rc file, suitable 22defaults may be compiled into the executable. Simply edit the slrnfeat.h 23file for this option. 24 25Background: 26 27 When slrn runsn it looks for a file that contains the description of all 28 the news groups. This is NOT the newsrc file. Rather, it is a file that 29 contains a one line summary of what each group is about. This file can be 30 quite large if there are many newsgroups. For example, on my system, the 31 newsgroup description file is 225 Kilobytes. It is not desirable for each 32 user to have their own private copy of this file, especially when there is 33 more than one user of slrn on a given system. Instead, the system 34 administrator only has to keep a copy of it in a directory that slrn knows 35 about. Part of the installation process described in this file involves 36 the creation of such a directory. 37 38 slrn assumes that newsgroup description file will be called 39 `newsgroups.dsc'. The directory where this file is located get hardcoded 40 into the binary. By default, it is /usr/local/share/slrn, but you can 41 change this with the --datadir option when running ./configure. 42 43 Now, you have to obtain the newsgroup description file. You can do that in 44 at least two ways. The easiest is to simply get the file `newsgroups.dsc' 45 from space.mit.edu:/pub/davis/slrn. The other method is just as easy but 46 involves slrn to create such a file for you. This is described below. 47 48With this background, the steps presented below should be clear. 49 50 0. Execute the steps outlines in README before continuing. 51 52 1. Create the directory `/usr/local/share/slrn' (or equivalent; after a 53 successful installation of slrn, it should already exist). 54 55 2. Run slrn as follows: 56 57 slrn -f SHAREDIR/slrn/newsgroups -d 58 59 (Of course, make the proper substution of SHAREDIR). This will create 60 a file newsgroups.dsc in SHAREDIR/slrn. 61 62 This step may take some time to complete for slow NNTP connections. 63 64 3. If more that one person will be reading this file, make sure it is 65 world readable, e.g., 66 67 chmod go+r SHAREDIR/newsgroups.dsc 68 69 70That's it!! 71