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

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

[Kai Großjohann]

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

> If you're a systems or network type there are files you look at on
> your system and network or commands you run that give you information
> about your systems and networks.

The information you need is not among them.  Even systems and network
types have to know, they cannot look it up in some file.

kai
-- 
~/.signature is: umop 3p!sdn    (Frank Nobis)

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

[Don Saklad]

thank you jonas steverud !

On the other hand a new systems or network type would probably figure
out the information observing a system or network. The question is
whether there're files or commands that could theoretically give the
information. I've seen people with expertise do this to their delight !
It just doesn't make any sense that the information isn't available
except by oral accounts.

The question is what are some of those files or commands?....




cheers! and kind regards,
 oo__  don Warner saklad

http://my.gnus.org/Members/dsaklad

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

[Adam Sjøgren]

On 16 Sep 2002 08:08:43 -0400, Don Saklad wrote:

> I've seen people with expertise do this to their delight !  It just
> doesn't make any sense that the information isn't available except
> by oral accounts.

The people that have impressed you so much by doing this have
undoubtly been guessing.

The reason that they have been successful is probably that there are
de-facto standards for what mailservers are called. Usually people
call them "mail.[domain]", "smtp.[domain", "pop.[domain]" or similar.

Guessing, for instance, that pop.ai.mit.edu is a mailserver serving
mail via POP for ai.mit.edu is not a far out guess, because
pop.ai.mit.edu exists. Same thing goes for news.ai.mit.edu and
mail.ai.mit.edu.

Incidently those three guesses might be appropriate for your specific
setup at ai.mit.edu.

But I must stress: These are *guesses*. The only authoritative way to
get the *correct* answer is to get the information for the people
responsible for the news and mailservers you need to use.

> The question is what are some of those files or commands?....

If you want to know whether your guess on a hostname is a name
associated with a machine, you can look it up in the Domain Name
System, DNS.

On most unix machines you can use the command "host" to do this.

For instance:

 $ host mail.ai.mit.edu
 mail.ai.mit.edu         CNAME   life.ai.mit.edu
 life.ai.mit.edu         A       128.52.32.80
 $ 

tells you that there is actually a machine that is supposed to respond
to the name "mail.ai.mit.edu".

If, on the other hand, you try to look up a non-existing machine with
the "host" command, you get something similar to this:

 $ host donsbox.ai.mit.edu
 donsbox.ai.mit.edu A record currently not present
 $

That way one can educate ones guesses. But they're still nothing more
than guesses.


  Best regards,

-- 
 "Så har den første snøen falt                                 Adam Sjøgren
  men det er ikkje derfor det er kaldt"                   asjo@koldfront.dk

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

[RL]

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

> Thank you Adam Sjo/gren !
> 
> Then the question becomes
> 1. how might you guess at the system and network information needed
>    b. Your ISP's newsserver	 
>    c. The User's Mailserver Type
>    f. The address of your mailserver internet provider or hostname

This isnt really a gnus problem.  If you use *any* mail or news client
you ahve to know these settings: even _Outlook Express_ requires you
to set these yourself.  People keep telling you that there is no
commands to do what you want.  you just have to know.

What email prog do you use at the moment? why not look at the values
you use in that program?

> 2. And how might you confirm the guesses?...
> 

Configure a mail client (eg gnus) with your guesses.
run the mail client
see if you can read news/mail

if not, try a different guess

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

[Josh Huber]

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