Miscellaneous Questions

How do I tell NCSA Mosaic to use my news server?

Set your NNTPSERVER environment variable to the name of the machine that serves news to you.

I can pull down group listings from my news servers but not any actual articles!

Your NNTP server apparently doesn't like to return articles named by message ID -- it will only return articles identified by group and article number. This is very bad, as the URL scheme Mosaic uses can only identify news articles by message ID. Your NNTP server is in violation of the NNTP spec (RFC 977) and should be investigated by your news administrator. (If your admin declares your NNTP server to be properly working, then feel free to send us a bug report, but we'll need read access to your NNTP server to do anything at that point.)

What's this URL (Uniform Resource Locator) thing?

A Uniform Resource Locator is a way to uniquely name a resource available over the network. Resources (also called documents) are commonly named by access method (e.g., gopher, wais, news, anonymous ftp), machine name (and optionally network port number), and filename.

More information on URL's is here. A new and incomplete primer on URL's is here.

What's this DTM thing?

DTM is short for Data Transfer Mechanism, a network protocol and library (developed at NCSA) for passing scientific data between processes running on different machines over the network. DTM is used in Collage, NCSA's real-time networked collaboration tool.

Since DTM is built right into NCSA Mosaic, you can send text files that you retrieve with Mosaic to running Collage sessions on the fly. If you think you're interested in doing this, get familiar with Collage first; the rest is easy.

DTM can also be used by NCSA Mosaic to receive data from network-based scientific databases like DMF (we have no DMF servers available for public use, however).

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