Newsgroup

General information

The class newsgroup is eecs.231 and is carried on news.cs.northwestern.edu .

All announcements for the class will be posted there. Major announcements (deadlines, new homework, etc.) will also be posted on this website.

Use the newsgroup to post questions on the material or assignments, and to answer posted questions. You may also post solutions to problems from the textbook (as long as they are not part of homework). You should never post answers to homework. Interesting links that are relevant to the class may also be posted; just try to keep all discussion on topic.

Posting to the newsgroup rather than emailing the staff will often get you an answer much faster.

If you need help on a g++ error message, then you should post the exact error message and the line of code where it occurred. Even better, try to write a small program that replicates the error, and post that.

Setup

These are some general instructions on how to set up and read newsgroups. Contact the staff or tech support if you have additional questions.

In order to read NWU newsgroups from home you need:

1. To be on the NWU network. If you are staying off-campus, then you'll need to install VPN and use it to connect to northwestern. You can get that at http://www.it.northwestern.edu/software/vpn/index.html Instructions on how to set it up are there as well.

2. To have a news reader. This is a program that connects to the news server, and downloads the messages of any newsgroups you subsribe to. For example, you can use Thunderbird, or Outlook Express or Opera Mail, or Agent.

3. To set up your news reader. Below are general instructions that are more or less the same for each newsreader. I have also listed some URLS with more specific instructions.

   • Start VPN if you are off campus

   • Start your newsreader

   • There's usually a Tools menu with an option called "Accounts" or "Email/News Accounts" or something similar. Select that.

   • You should now see a "Create New Account" option. Select it and specify that it's a News account.

   • You'll be asked for the following pieces of information:

     • Your name
     • Your email address
     • Your email (smtp) server (so you can post). If you are already set up for mail, then there should be an existing email account. Look it up and check what the mail server is. It's probably something like merle.it.northwestern.edu or casbah.it.northwestern.edu
     • The news (nntp) server. This is news.cs.northwestern.edu
     • There will be a field called "port". This usually has a default value of 119. Leave it the way it is.
     • If it asks whether you want authentication, say no.
     • If it asks whether you should post messages in HTML, say no. Actually try to find out if there's any such setting anywhere in the News set-up and make sure it's turned off.

     Here are some links with more detailed instructions & pictures:

     • http://opensourcearticles.com/introduction_to_thunderbird_8
     • http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/oe/gettingnews.mspx

   • So now you are set up. The next step is to subscribe to certain newsgroups. If your newsreader asks you whether you want to browse at newsgroups, say yes and then look for and select eecs.231 . Otherwise, look for a Subscribe menu option and then ask it to list all the newsgroups and select the one you want.

   • To post messages, there's typically a Compose or Post New Message menu and it works like email. Once you set it up, feel free to post a test message to the class newsgroup to see if it works ok.