C News on 2.11BSD: help!

[Warren Toomey]

Hi all, I'm trying to bring C News up on 2.11BSD and I'm stuck!

The symptom: I can post a news article on one machine and I see it
transfer via UUCP over TCP to a second machine. I see it arrive in the
X. uucp spool folder. Then it disappears before being put in the news
spool area.

I'm leaving what I've done here: https://minnie.tuhs.org/211BSD_Cnews/
with a bunch of notes. If anybody has some ideas, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks :-)

        Warren

[Warren Toomey]

My friend Steve Jenkin pointed me at https://github.com/jwbrase/CNews-PiDP-11
which is probably where I should have started, if I'd only known!!

Thanks Steve :-)

        Warren

[Warren Toomey]

OK, so after a few hours of work setting up Jon Brase's C News, I now have two 2.11BSD systems exchanging news. Yay!!

I'm going to be busy/elsewhere for about a week. After that, I want to make a tarball + some scripts so that you can easily install C news on your own 2.11BSD system, and configure it to exchange news with other 2.11BSD machines (e.g. PiDP-11s behind a home router with port forwarding).

I might even be able to set up a system which is always on-line for others to try and connect to. No promises!

Question: what directory for local binaries do you all use? Is it 100% /usr/local, or do some people have /usr/local/bin as this directory?

Thanks. Warren

[Johnny Billquist]

I would place it under /usr/local/bin if it was me.

Johnny

On 6/10/26 12:30, Warren Toomey wrote:
> OK, so after a few hours of work setting up Jon Brase's C News, I now
> have two 2.11BSD systems exchanging news. Yay!!
>
> I'm going to be busy/elsewhere for about a week. After that, I want to
> make a tarball + some scripts so that you can easily install C news on
> your own 2.11BSD system, and configure it to exchange news with other
> 2.11BSD machines (e.g. PiDP-11s behind a home router with port forwarding).
>
> I might even be able to set up a system which is always on-line for
> others to try and connect to. No promises!
>
> Question: what directory for local binaries do you all use? Is it 100% /
> usr/local, or do some people have /usr/local/bin as this directory?
>
> Thanks. Warren
>
> On Wednesday, 10 June 2026 at 17:05:37 UTC+10 Warren Toomey wrote:
>
> My friend Steve Jenkin pointed me at https://github.com/jwbrase/

> CNews-PiDP-11 <https://github.com/jwbrase/CNews-PiDP-11>

> which is probably where I should have started, if I'd only known!!
>
> Thanks Steve :-)
>
>         Warren
>
> On Wednesday, 10 June 2026 at 08:51:16 UTC+10 Warren Toomey wrote:
>
> Hi all, I'm trying to bring C News up on 2.11BSD and I'm stuck!
>
> The symptom: I can post a news article on one machine and I seeit
> transfer via UUCP over TCP to a second machine. I see it arrive
> in the
> X. uucp spool folder. Then it disappears before being put in the
> news
> spool area.
>
> I'm leaving what I've done here: https://

> minnie.tuhs.org/211BSD_Cnews/ <https://
> minnie.tuhs.org/211BSD_Cnews/>

> with a bunch of notes. If anybody has some ideas, I'd love to
> hear them!
>
> Thanks :-)
>
>         Warren
>

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[Malcolm Ray]

So, maybe create a new private pidp.* hierarchy? Or use alt.sys.pdp11 / comp.sys.dec / comp.unix.bsd?

It's an awful long time since I ran cnews. I replaced it with INN as soon as possible, but it might be fun to play with cnews and uucp again.

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[Jacob Ritorto]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 at 09:23, Malcolm Ray <m...@apathetic.org.uk> wrote:

So, maybe create a new private pidp.* hierarchy? Or use alt.sys.pdp11 / comp.sys.dec / comp.unix.bsd?

I, for one, don't yet have a PiDP and am interested in running this on authentic DEC metal (11/70, 11/83, etc).  
Just from briefly listening in, I gather the code's not PiDP specific, right?  Still runs on the real thing?
If the existing newsgroup names still work, would it be faux pas to just continue to use them in our continuation of the legacy?

If there's PiDP-specific news, that would of course warrant inventing a .pidp. named group.

Least surprise.

thx

jake

PS. None of this is meant to denigrate the value of PiDP at all. 
I'm receiving tremendous benefit on my real PDPs from the work. 
And I greatly admire the PiDP concept, too, and want to get one someday.

[John Hudak]

Good news!  (no pun intended).  I don't have a lot of knowledge about how C news interacts with usenet. Back in the day, I was using it just as a recipient.  As I understand it, to get news via usenet one has to subscribe, as in a paid subscription, to a usenet feed.  So will each PiDP system running C news need to have a usenet subscription?  If one node has a subscription is it OK for the other PiDP nodes get news feeds from it?

Thanks

J

--

[Malcolm Ray]

If it runs on 2.11BSD under emulation, I see no reason why it wouldn't run on real hardware.

The real Usenet is now mostly a howling wasteland of spam (and binaries of questionable legality). But there are still some groups which live on, such as comp.os.vms. If using one or more existing groups, an important question would be whether to get a feed of those groups (e.g. from eternal-september.org, which offers free text-only feeds). Admittedly, I haven't looked at any PDP-11-related groups to see whether they still get real traffic.

[Richard McDonald]

A free usenet feed can be obtained at https://www.eternal-september.org.