readers.conf problems

[Russ Allbery]

jher <jher at fnord.org> writes:

> I telnet to server port 119, I get immediately disconnected.  No banner
> from innd, nada.  I copied the entry for the default internal users and
> now I get the banner and can read news normally via netscape, etc.
> However, I never get asked for username/password.  I've tried all sorts
> of combinations, reading shadowed off /etc/passwd, off a flat text file
> both shadowed and unshadowed and I get the same effect everytime.  Any
> ideas?

Since you allow unauthenticated users to read some newsgroups:

> # unknown users
> access "no-one" {
>         # can only read newsgroups, and only a restricted subset of those.
>         users: "<no-user>"
>         #newsgroups: "*,!internal.*"
>         read: "export.*"
> }

you don't *have* to authenticate, and therefore Netscape may not prompt
you for authentication information.  I'm not sure how it works precisely.
When you attempt to read some other newsgroup, you should get prompted for
authentication.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>