Re: How to get informational details about your system and network for setting up gnus email

[Josh Huber <huber@alum.wpi.edu>]

Don Saklad <dsaklad@nestle.ai.mit.edu> writes:

> c. commands

You can you your standard unix tools such as:

a. ping
b. host or nslookup
c. telnet

to guess and observe what hosts/services exist.

> b. files

Not very appropriate, unless you are looking at the configuration
files from an already configured machine, and duplicating that
configuration to another machine. (which is probably likely, since
most people will not be using Gnus as their first email/news reader)

> a. observation
> d. ruling out

A good guess with smtp servers (as has already been stated) is either
"mail" or "smtp".  Let's take ai.mit.edu as the example domain.

$ host mail.ai.mit.edu
mail.ai.mit.edu is an alias for life.ai.mit.edu.
life.ai.mit.edu has address 128.52.32.80

Okay, the host exists, let's see if it is running an SMTP service:

$ telnet mail.ai.mit.edu smtp
Trying 128.52.32.80...
Connected to ai.mit.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-life.ai.mit.edu ESMTP Sendmail 8.12.2/8.12.2/BASENAME(ai.master.life-8.12.2.mc,.mc):RCS_REVISION(evision:1.23
220-Tue, 17 Sep 2002 08:06:13 -0400 (EDT)
220 This is MIT.  Collect or third party calls not accepted.

Looks good.  Based on that information, I would use mail.ai.mit.edu as
the outgoing (SMTP) server.


Next, we should try for either a pop or imap server for the actual
reading/retrieving of our mail.  IMAP tends to be better, and lets the
users store their mail on the server. (which has the nice side-effect
of allowing people to use different email clients with the same
mailboxes)  So, we'll first look for IMAP.  Sometimes these services
run on the "mail" host as well, so we'll check for all three: mail,
imap and pop:

$ host imap.ai.mit.edu
Host imap.ai.mit.edu not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

...no host named imap.at.mit.edu...

$ host pop.ai.mit.edu
pop.ai.mit.edu is an alias for life.ai.mit.edu.
life.ai.mit.edu has address 128.52.32.80

Ah, but there is a pop.ai.mit.edu.  Also note that both mail and imap
are actually aliases for the same machine (life.ai.mit.edu).


Now, lets check for running services on life:

$ telnet life.ai.mit.edu imap
Trying 128.52.32.80...

...no response on the imap port, so lets try pop3:

$ telnet life.ai.mit.edu pop3
Trying 128.52.32.80...
Connected to ai.mit.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK Qpopper (version 4.0.3) at life starting.  <12924.1032264741@life>

Ah, so that works.  For this setup, I would use pop.ai.mit.edu as the
incoming mail server.  The type would be POP or POP3.


Finally, you probably also would like to read news, so looking for a
news host would be a good idea.  A similar route can be taken to find
a news server.

Usually the news hostname is "news" or "nntp":

$ host news.ai.mit.edu
news.ai.mit.edu is an alias for entertainment-tonight.ai.mit.edu.
entertainment-tonight.ai.mit.edu has address 128.52.32.26


Okay, lets try testing the NNTP port on news.ai.mit.edu:

$ telnet news.ai.mit.edu nntp
Trying 128.52.32.26...


...so, it doesn't seem to be responding to nntp, so we should keep
looking for a news server.  A next good guess would be news.mit.edu:

$ host news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu is an alias for SENATOR-BEDFELLOW.mit.edu.
SENATOR-BEDFELLOW.mit.edu has address 18.181.0.25

...okay, so this host exists as well, lets try it:

$ telnet news.mit.edu nntp
Trying 18.181.0.25...
Connected to SENATOR-BEDFELLOW.MIT.EDU.
Escape character is '^]'.
502 senator-bedfellow.mit.edu: Access denied to your node - usenet@mit.edu

Ah, so it is running a news server, which I assume is accessible from
inside MIT. (but not to me!)  So, for the NNTP server, I would use
news.mit.edu.


Hopefully this will be helpful in determining your settings, although
it looks like you have no problems with figuring out how to post :)

-- 
Josh Huber