[Techtalk] Re: scheduling a newsreader

[James]

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 19:14:56 -0400, you wrote:

>Hello everyone,
>
>>From time to time I like to download video's of bands, movie trailers,
>mp3's and what have you from my ISP's usenet server. My connection
>is very fast, usually around 450KB/s so grabbing 2GB's if files is
>trivial, however, I do have a 30gb per month limit, *unless* I
>download after midnight (up to 6am I belive).
>
>So in that time frame I could easily get what im looking for without 
>exceeding my limit. The problem is how? I have Pan installed and see 
>no obvious scheduling arrangement, but I might have just overlooked
>that, I dunno. Are there any othe newsreaders you can think of
>that will do what  I want? 
>
>It could be a command line reader too which is fine, as long as
>I can say, "flag these headers, go get them at midnight" or
>similar.

You can certainly do this with the Leafnode news server: just
configure your usual newsreader to download from it, then put the
fetchnews command into a "crontab" file (for help with that bit, try
the "man crontab" or "man cron" commands, or ask on this list) set to
run at, say, 5 past midnight. That way, Leafnode fetches the news to
your machine during the free period, then you transfer it from
Leafnode into your news client whenever you want.

If you can get your newsreader to download from the command line
without user intervention, you can put that command in cron instead -
but I don't know of any with that feature off-hand...


James.