>   I would be interested to know if there is a Bulletin Board package
>that would exist for VM that could be peered with LISTSERV lists
>(the most active ones). Information on this would be greatly appreciated.
 
There are two implementations of Usenet News for VM.
 
1) Princeton Netnews (contact Irwin Tillman, IRWIN@PUCC). This
implementation contains Listserv-News gateway code, so you may feed
any list you like into your News system at your own site.
 
2) PSUVM Netnews (see PSUTOOLS FILELIST on Listserv@PSUVM). Bill
Verity (WHV@PSUVM) is feeding a lot of lists into the News system.
You may ask him (or Linda Littleton, LRL@PSUVM) to point you to
the next site that could feed you with these gatewayed groups.
 
At the current point in time I'd recommend the PSUVM package
(its user interface is nice, it blows many Un*x news readers
out of the water). However if local gatewaying is important
to you (e.g. because you have a lot of local lists to be brought
into the News system, or if there is no nearby feed), you may consider
Irwin's implementation. Or ask Bill if/when he intend to release his
gateway code.
 
In case some VAX/VMS hackers are reading this and are jealous now:
There is ANU News for you (sorry, don't know where to order it without
digging thru piles of old mail archives)
 
-----
 
Reading all this list stuff under netnews is really great. Imagine,
only real personal mail in your reader. No hassle to unsubscribe
for 6,754 days plus 67 CPU cycles because of vacation. And zillions
of other advantages. And one more server machine to maintain. And
that beast will of course crash with disk overflow the very day
the maintainer is out of town. And your local performance guru
will see you every other day (if you don't run on a 3090), just
another example how electronic communication can help to meet
people.
 
-----
 
And since nobody is really curious to see the first mailing
list loop caused by a Netnews system let me add some warnings.
 
Although feeding Listserv lists into Netnews is easy and not
risky (provided your gateway is subscribed with the FULLHDR
option, and after making sure that you are subscribed to the
real list, not to a non-peered redist list which may be
subscribed with SHORTHDR, and therefore removing the original
Message-Id), there are some gotchas for the other way around.
There are solutions, but unfortunately there are several solutions,
that may not be mixed without producing duplicates (or something
worse) on the mailing list. So if you are not really sure you
know what you are doing, you should disable posting to these
groups, and use good old mail for postings. If you can't imagine
what could happen, if you never have heard of the ucbvax gateway
and the inet distribution, if you can't make any sense of what I'm
talking about, then you don't qualify to run a bidirectional
gateway. Of course, if it's just for local stuff, you are free
to mess it up any way you like it. But keep in mind that even
if you start as an isolated Netnews site, you probably will
start exchanging News with other sites sooner or later.
 
(And ooops, if you try really hard, you can even screw up when
feeding lists into the news system if you have full Usenet
connection. Using the sample set up of the PUCC/PSUVM implementation
should keep you on the safe side, though)
 
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Further discussion should take place on NETNWS-L@NDSUVM1, a list
everybody should subscribe to if interested in running Netnews
under VM or VMS.
 
  Thomas