About the soon starting using of news-groups in Hera-B

Dear collaborator, 

as has been discussed at the software workshop in Zeuthen a couple of
weeks ago, we will gradually move from distributing relevant information
by email to a bulletin board system using newsgroups distributed by DESY.
These can be easily accessed, you have to ask your system adminstration on
what has to be done. 

For those who work on the DESY UNIX clusters and/or the Vax, the
information is most easily accessible by using one of the following
newsgroup readers: 

- tin (just type tin and subscribe to a given newsgroup (see below))

- pine (as soon as you have subscribed to a given newsgroup, this will 
       appear in the folder listings and can be accessed)

- www (see DESY newsgroups; only read access here)

The advantages of this system are 

- everybody can SUBSCRIBE to any newsgroup she/he is interested in 
  hence the information flow becomes very transparent within the 
  collaboration but at the same time you can filter unwanted information

- everybody can ADD to any newsgroup information (meeting announcements,  
  comments, etc.) without the need for an up-to-date email-list 

The newsgroups that will be (have been) established so far are listed below:
 
- desy.hera-b.general.......already installed

- desy.hera-b.vdet   
- desy.hera-b.inner
- desy.hera-b.outer
- desy.hera-b.meetings
- desy.hera-b.rich
- desy.hera-b.software
- desy.hera-b.daq
- desy.hera-b.ecal
- desy.hera-b.muon
- desy.hera-b.target
- desy.hera-b.flt
- desy.hera-b.slt
- desy.hera-b.farm 
- desy.hera-b.physics

You are strongly encouraged to use this system from now on. We will have
an eight week transition period where information will be sent out both by
mail and via this new system.  From then on the mail system will no
longer be used. 

Best regards, 
Andreas. 

• There is a semi-comercial WWW-browser "netscape" which has a nice graphic userinterface for reading and posting news.
• There is a gui newsreader 'xrn' available on the X4U at DESY.
• At the DESY HP-Cluster tin can be found at /groups/herab/tin.
• if you want to be informed about new news at every login at your UNIX- maschine and you have tin installed at your computer, you should include the line 'tin [-r] -Z -v' in your .profile. (The need of the -r option depends on wether you are using a remote newsserver or not)