# Help with tin



## BillySastard89 (May 18, 2011)

Hey everyone. First off, I'm pretty new to Unix, and only know some basic stuff. Anyways, I installed tin, and I have no ideas what variables to add where. I tried adding NNTPSERVER=whatever and export NNTPSERVER to .profile, and when I tried starting tin with *tin -r* it didn't work. I'm fairly certain I'm doing this wrong, and any help is greatly appreciated.


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## Beastie (May 18, 2011)

.profile is for the Bourne shell. Is that what you're using? If you're using a C shell, you should use .cshrc instead.

```
setenv NNTPSERVER whatever
```


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## BillySastard89 (May 18, 2011)

I'm using the shell that comes with FreeBSD by default. Also sorry about the improper formatting :\


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## Beastie (May 18, 2011)

What does
`% echo $SHELL`
say?


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## BillySastard89 (May 19, 2011)

```
/bin/csh
```
I'm assuming that's the C shell?


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## BillySastard89 (May 19, 2011)

ok I added the variable:


```
setenv NNTPSERVER us.blocknews.net
```

Then I added my username and password, then this came up:


```
Server Expects Authentication.
Authorized for user: myusername
```

Then it stopped at that. Did I forget to add something?


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## BillySastard89 (May 19, 2011)

Oh, also forgot to mention that I started tin with 
	
	



```
tin -r
```


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## fmw (May 20, 2011)

Did you create a .newsauth file in your home directory?

the format for that file is:

```
$nntpserver $password $username
```

(mind the order of the entries)

Don't forget to set the permissions on that file properly:


```
chmod 600 .newsauth
```


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## BillySastard89 (May 21, 2011)

Thank you, I will try that now  and what file do I set the permissions in? Sorry, like I said I'm pretty much brand new to Unix.


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## fmw (May 24, 2011)

Hi, 
this is just a command you enter in your home directory. Simply put, the permissions are stored in the file system itself, not in a separate file.

tin will work without this, but you'd get a complaint about insecure permissions for that file. 

To explain this a bit further, these 3 digits represent the permissions for User (=you), Group (you can make up groups of users which will be allowed to use the same files, and some programs need that as well) and Others (=everyone else), in this order.

The possible values are 4 for read, 2 for write and 1 for execute permissions. These are added, so 600 means the file can be read and written only by you, but not by any other users.  

Take a look at the manual page for chmod if you want to know more:

```
man chmod
```

Hope I didn't confuse you too much


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## Beastie (May 24, 2011)

The Handbook has a page for virtually anything: Chapter 3 UNIX Basics - Permissions.


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## BillySastard89 (Jun 16, 2011)

Hey all, sorry it took so long for me to answer back. Well, I tried adding that info to .newsauth, and it still doing the same thing: it just says i'm authorized, then sits there doing nothing. Any ideas?


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