What is Netnews?

Netnews, or UseNet News, is a worldwide electronic conferencing system designed as a collection of bulletin boards. Several thousand different bulletin boards (Newsgroups) are available. Netnews users all over the world share information by electronically reading and posting articles.

Newsgroups are carefully named in a hierarchical structure to help identify their content. Within each newsgroup are various articles (postings) contributed by users. Each posting is labeled with a subject line. Typically the subject line is used to specify a topic and allow users to follow different conversations (threads). Some Netnews users are experts in their fields, but most are just enthusiastic people who enjoy sharing ideas and opinions.

Penn State maintains its own psu hierachy, which limits distribution to Penn State computer systems and serves for discussions related to Penn State.

Below are examples of popular Penn State newsgroups:

psu.jobs

psu.market.forsale

psu.market.housing

psu.market.computers

psu.market.books

psu.clubs

How Does It All Work?

Local Internet providers maintain a news server machine, called an NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) Server. The ITS news server is called news.psu.edu. A list of available newsgroups and articles are stored on this server. Typically, articles are held for a set period of time, days, weeks, or months, depending on the discretion of the Internet provider, and then are purged to make room for new postings.

You can access the NNTP server over the Internet by using a program called a newsreader. The newsreader, which resides on your personal computer, provides a friendly user interface and communicates with the server. When you choose to scan the list of available newsgroups, the list is forwarded from the local news server and is displayed in your newsreader. Within each newsgroup, you can read articles that appeal to you. When you post an article, the article is first forwarded to the news server of the local Internet provider and then a copy is distributed to other news servers all over the world. Most newsreaders allow articles to be saved, printed, or mailed to others.

Authentication

ITS provides news service only for the Penn State community. For this reason, we require that the user authenticates with the news server before we allow any news to be posted. To authenticate, the news server must be given a valid Penn State Access Account ID and password. Numerous newsreaders can be found on the Internet. Look for software that has Secure Socket Layer (SSL) compliant encryption. Both Netscape and Outlook Express are good choices for newsreaders.

Netiquette

Netiquette is network etiquette. Before you post articles, we recommend that you become a "silent observer" for a short time before you join in the conversation. This will give you a chance to become familiar with the etiquette and styles of various newsgroups. The newsgroups news.announce.newusers and news.newusers.questions offer excellent information for beginners. Also see the following Web site: http://www.albion.com/netiquette.

Requesting A Newsgroup

Members of the Penn State community also may consider using the Penn State Portal's built-in news reader channel. To access the UseNet News Reader channel, click on the "Add Channels" link on the Portal header. Then, choose the Portal category from the list of channel categories. Choose the UseNet News Reader channel and save it to your Portal.

Users will be able to read and post news from their home machines even if the machine does not have a Penn State IP address by authenticating with their respective Penn State Access Account userids and passwords. To guarantee that user passwords are sent over the network securely, SSL is enabled on the news server.

Web browsers/news readers should be SSL-enabled and should support 128bit encryption. (Typically, this can be checked via a Web browser's security and/or advanced preferences). Users also should check to make sure that their news server configuration is set for news.psu.edu.

For assistance, please send e-mail to the ITS Helpdesk staff at helpdesk@psu.edu.