Faster Newsgroup Access With Hamster

by Dave Harms

Published 2007-02-22    Printer-friendly version

Most of the time I find the SoftVelocity newsgroups painfully slow. I don't mean the people are dense (although that happens often enough in chat), I mean it can take the better part of a minute for a message to load after I click on the header in Thunderbird. I don't know if that's a Thunderbird problem or a server problem, but I know I'm not alone. Ordinarily I wouldn't even notice as I prefer to set my newsreader to download all messages automatically, but Thunderbird, which I otherwise like a lot, has a "download all" feature that, for my purposes, is essentially useless and buggy to boot.

A few days ago Sean Cameron posted a message (which I eventually managed to read) saying that CapeSoft uses Hamster, a news and mail proxy server for Windows, to get around this problem.

I'm indebted to Sean. Since installing Hamster my newsgroup reading experience has been transformed. Now that I have a local cache of the SV server I never have to wait for a message to load.

There were, however, a few bumps on the road to Nirvana. In this article I'll show you how to set up Hamster and configure it to cache the SV news server.

Installing Hamster

The first thing is to make sure you're using the right version of Hamster. I started out with something called Hamster Playground from www.elbiah.de/hamster. I'm not going to make that link live, because I don't want you to go there accidentally. No, it isn't a porn site. Hamster Playground is in fact Hamster, but it appears to be some early version and it has an unbelievably convoluted user interface (not that I find the Hamster I use that much more intuitive, but anyway...). The main problem I had with Hamster Playground, once I figured out how to set it up, was that I couldn't get it to post to the SV news server. Instead I had to post all messages from Thunderbird directly to the SV news server, which was a bit of a hassle. Then I asked Jono Woodhouse how he'd set up posting to the SV server, and as soon as I got his screen shots I knew I had the wrong rodent in the house. Thanks, Jono!

The version you and I want is Hamster Classic 2.0 or later. I downloaded 2.1.0.11 from SoftPedia.

Installing Hamster is a breeze. It comes as a zip file, and you unpack it into whatever directory you like. A tip for those of you who travel: I occasionally sync my Thunderbird setup to my laptop, and to keep this process simple I put Hamster in a subdirectory of my Thunderbird data folder. You can install Hamster on your desktop machine or on another machine on your network; it really doesn't matter as long as you can access Hamster's port, which defaults to 119, the standard NNTP port.

Hamster comes with two executables: hamster.exe and ham.exe. Hamster.exe is the one you want to run, and you'll probably want to set up a shortcut as well.

The first time you run Hamster (see Figure 1) you'll see a bunch of warning messages about directories Hamster needed to create. You can safely ignore these warnings.

Figure 1. Hamster on startup

Next you need to set the admin password. As noted in the help, you won't be able to connect to Hamster with your newsreader unless you do this. Choose Configuration, Accounts & Passwords ..., highlight the second line (Hamster Administrator) and click on Edit. You'll see the window shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Changing the admin password

Click on Change to set a new password. You need this for your news server to access Hamster (and you'll need to tell your newsreader to use the userid admin and the password you specified).

Now go back to the main menu to create a news server record. Choose Configuration|News: Server, Groups, Pulls .... for the News Configuration window (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Setting the pull limits

On the General tab the default settings, at least on the version I installed, are to pull only the 100 oldest items for each group. That makes no sense on the SV groups; change this to the newest items. I'm pulling the 1000 newest.

Now to go the Newsserver tab and click on Add. Enter the SV news server name as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Setting the server name

Click OK and the server settings window appears (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Server settings

If you're using a userid/password with the SV news server click on Edit to set those values.

At this point you've configured the news server but you don't yet have a list of newsgroups. To get those you have to go online. Go back to the main Hamster screen and choose Online|All NNTP-servers (or you can specify just the SV news server you set up). This tells Hamster to go online and do any waiting tasks (and like a good little rodent it knows that you need the list of newsgroups because you've just added the server).

Now you need to tell Hamster which of the newsgroups you want to pull from the SV server. Go to Configuration|News: Server, Groups, Pulls ..., make sure the SV news server is highlighted, and click on News-Pulls. Select the newsgroups you want to download and click on Subscribe selected groups (see Figure 6). Note the Show groups with drop list. The available options include matching on a regular expression, simple string matching, "begins with", and a really nifty one for anyone who uses newsgroups a lot, match on initials. For this last option "clc" would match comp.lang.clarion.

Figure 6. Selecting the newsgroups

With the groups selected you're now ready to download messages. Go to the main menu and once again choose Online| All NNTP-Servers. Depending on the Pull-limit options you specified earlier it may take a long time to download messages and get the database up to date.

To update the local cache you can do one of two things - repeat the last step of going online, which gets a bit tedious after a while, or set up an automated task to poll the SV news server.

Periodic news retrieval

If you want to automatically retrieve newsgroup messages at regular intervals you need to create a simple script. Choose Script|Manage scripts and modules ..., then click on the Scripts tag (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Managing scripts

Click on New and enter a suitable file name (Figure 8). You don't need to specify the .hsc extension.

Figure 8. Creating a script

When you click OK Hamster opens notepad with a default script containing a comment and a quit statement. Delete these and paste in the following text:

#!hs2
 while( true )
  HamNewsJobsClear
  HamNewsJobsPostDef
  HamNewsJobsPullDef
  HamNewsJobsStart
  HamWaitIdle
  sleep(300000 )
  endwhile
quit

This script is an endless loop which posts and pulls newsgroup messages, waits until all tasks are done, and then sleeps for five minutes (sleep times are in milliseconds) before looping again.

Save the file and exit notepad; you should now see GetNews.hsc listed in the scripts list. Go back to the main menu.

To run the script immediately just select it from the Script menu where you'll now see it listed.

Running Hamster automatically

There are two more parts to fully automating Hamster: starting Hamster automatically, and starting the script automatically.

To run Hamster at startup just create a shortcut to Hamster.exe and copy it to your \Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder (at least under XP - I haven't tried this with Vista yet).

To tell Hamster to run the script automatically on startup choose Configuration|Automation and click on the Actions tab (Figure 9). Expand Hamster and click on Startup. In the Run script dropcombo choose GetNews.hsc.

Figure 9. Setting the script to run at startup

Now you're all set. Hamster will run whenever you start Windows, and it will poll the SV news server for news items at the interval you specify in the script.

Hamster minimizes to the system tray so it's out of the way unless you need it. Sean Cameron says he's found Hamster to be a bit unstable and in occasional need of a restart. I haven't noticed any problems yet; your mileage may vary.

Posting messages

Unlike my experience with Hamster Playground, I didn't encounter any problems posting messages back to the SV server using Hamster Classic. I didn't have to modify any other settings; Hamster simply accepts my messages and posts them to the SV server on the next iteration of the script.

However, as Jono Woodhouse has pointed out to me, there is a potential problem with using Hamster as a proxy for multiple users. Some of SV's groups are public access, and some require a password. If you're logging in, the server enforces the name that's in your login profile on the SV server. You can't change that simply by changing your newsgroup client settings. Because of this, all messages posted to the SV news server via a login account will appear to come from one user. For this reason Jono has set up two news servers within Hamster, one for the public access newsgroups, and another for the subscriber-only newsgroups.

Summary

If like me you find the SoftVelocity newsgroups too slow, give Hamster a try. It's free, it's fairly easy to configure (once you know what to do) and it will give you lightning-fast access to newsgroup messages. Hamster even supports NNTP searches, something missing from the SV server.

Hamster also offers mail proxying (POP3, SMTP, and IMAP) if that's something you're after.

Download Hamster

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David Harms is an independent software developer and the editor and publisher of Clarion Magazine. He is also co-author with Ross Santos of Developing Clarion for Windows Applications, published by SAMS (1995), and has written or co-written several Java books. David is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA).

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Clarion Magazine ISSN 1718-9942