See an unfamiliar term? Check the newsletter glossary.
News from:
M V C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , I n c .
P.O. Box 4963
Manchester, NH 03108-4963
(603) 429-2223
September 1993
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found
on mv in the public archive; look in /pub/mv/inews. They're also in
the online menu!
UUCP news batching size increased
For most sites that take news feeds over UUCP, MV delivers
compressed batches of news articles. The batches are generated once
every hour using ufeed. ufeed imposes a maximum on the size of each
batch; if this size is exceeded during the generation of a batch, the
feed is broken up into multiple batches. Until recently, the maximum
size was 200000 bytes (before compression). Because a lot of the
transmission time is taken up in the delay between the sending of each
file, we've increased the batch size to 600000 bytes before compres-
sion. This should help to reduce the impact of the idle time between
each batch.
This maximum is configurable per site, so if you want your batch
size changed, let us know. (This is currently not a setting that you
can adjust through the ufeed mail server.) For sites that do not
receive much news, this limit probably won't make a difference, since
the hourly batching will produce fairly small batches for limited
feeds.
Selecting an EDITOR for your online account
Editing text with an MV online account is done by using a text
editor program. MV has several available, including vi, emacs, jove,
and pico. If you aren't familiar with any of these, we recommend
starting out with pico because it is designed for a person who is more
concerned with editing than with choosing an editor. It does not
expect you to remember every command that you can use, but has a menu
display at the bottom of the screen to remind you and guide you.
Many online facilities require, or at least sometimes allow, the
use of a text editor. These facilities include sending mail, compos-
ing news, filling out forms, and so forth. These facilities do not
necessarily know which editor you prefer. You should select an editor
MV Communications, Inc. September 1993
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by changing your .login file (a file of commands that is executed
whenever you log in) to include a line like this:
setenv EDITOR pico
(case is important). If there is already such a line in your .login
file, as there is with the more recently added new users, you can
change the selection of editor in that line. The change takes effect
the next time you log in.
finger exercises
A commonly-used resource on the Internet is the finger system.
finger lets you "reach out and touch someone" either on the local
machine, or across the net. That is, it is used to find out some
information about a person or resource on an Internet site. Use the
finger command like this:
finger mem@mv.mv.com
to find out information about the user mem on the site mv.mv.com. You
can omit the username (e.g., @mv.mv.com) to finger an entire site, or
you can omit all arguments to finger the local site. Many Internet
systems alter the information returned by finger to do special things,
and some sites disallow it altogether out of privacy considerations.
You can change your own finger information to return custom
information about yourself. There are three components to the finger
data: your personal information, a project description, and a plan.
To change your personal information, use the command chfn. Run-
ning this command will put you into a text editor where you can see
the tagged information about yourself (tags are followed by a colon,
and then the data follows that). Use the editor to change the infor-
mation (not the tags!); when you exit, that information will be
updated.
Your project and plan are stored in files named .project and
.plan in your home directory. Simply edit either of these files to
make this information available to finger. Remember that you'll also
have to adjust the permissions of these files to make them readable.
Do this with the chmod command, e.g.:
chmod a+r .project
(a+r can be read: for everyone (a), add read permission (+r)).
finger is sometimes used to distribute information rather than
(or as well as) give details about a person. For instance, you can
get the current Billboard charts by
finger buckmr@rpi.edu
MV Communications, Inc. September 1993
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or get a comprehensive Boston-area weather report with:
finger weather@cirrus.mit.edu
(warning, though, this is a big report).
As an aside, remember that you can access finger information from
a UUCP site through MV's mail server. For example:
To: server@mv.mv.com
Subject: finger normg@halcyon.halcyon.com
will send you an e-mail reply with recent Nielson TV ratings. (Send a
subject of help finger for more info).
We are also investigating an update to our finger server on MV
that would allow UUCP sites to provide custom finger information about
your business or other personal info; this would be available to any
Internet user who can use the finger command. Let us know if there is
interest.
MV Communications, Inc. September 1993