How to obtain back news items (second posting)

[spanky!ka]

I have implemented a system to allow people to obtain old news
articles. For example, let's say you didn't save the fleece pro-
gram when it was posted, and now you want it. Articles are
fetched from the USENET Archive by article id. Since you don't
know the article id of the article you want, type "lsar
net.sources". Anywhere from an hour to a day later (depending on
how many systems are between you and spanky), you will receive a
piece of mail listing the article ids and titles of all the arti-
cles in net.sources. Grepping through this for the word fleece
should print
harpo.1218 fleece.c
harpo.1219 fleece.1
Type "getar harpo.1218" and "getar harpo.1219", and these arti-
cles will be mailed to you.

All netnews articles dating back to Dec. 1 are available. Some
articles posted before this are available. One of these, "usenet
etiquette" (article id eagle.618), should be read by EVERYBODY.

The programs lsar and getar, along with a manual page describing
them, have been posted to net.sources under the title "Programs
for accessing archived news articles."

It should be stressed that this system is temporary. I project
that I will run out of disk space in about four months, at which
point certain newsgroups will be removed from the archive.
Kenneth Almquist