> 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) ----- 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