Questions/discussion concering the homework and projects
can be posted to the class newsgroup utsa.cs.5363.d,
which is hosted on news.cs.utsa.edu. The instructor
may also periodically post homework solutions, and soft copies of
the lecture notes and homework problems to the newsgroup.
The newsgroup is only accessible from on campus. If you are off
campus, you may ssh into main20X.cs.utsa.edu and run the text mode
client, tin, with the command rtin. (Then, use g to add
the utsa.cs.5363.d newsgroup.) Or you may use ssh to
do port forwarding to use with an off campus graphical client.
In order to use a graphical news reader under Linux on your home
machine, you can use the command ssh -f -L 1119:news.cs.utsa.edu:119
main201.cs.utsa.edu sleep 3600 (this command forwards connections
to port 119 on the local machine to port 1119 on news.cs.utsa.edu by
rerouting them through main201.cs.utsa.edu; the sleep 3600 is just
the command to wait 3600 seconds and then exits), and then run your
graphical newsreader, e.g., Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla SeaMonkey,
pan, claws-mail, configured to connect to a nntp server on port 1119
of localhost within 5 minutes. An equivalent mechanism is available
through the GUI of Windows ssh clients.
Some of the material which the instructor has prepared in PDF format have been posted to the newsgroups as MIME encoded attachments. Depending on your newsreader, it may be difficult to read these attachments.
If you are using rtin on the "main" machines, you will discover that you get error messages about "metamail" being missing. You can still save the attachments as follows:
After doing this, the files will be in ~/News and can be downloaded to your home computer using ssh/scp. You may find that some of the attachments (e.g., the week 5 practice question solutions) you need to find are in "followup" (reply) rather than original postings. If you have trouble finding them, you may want to use "u" to change the threading mode or use "l" to list the messages within an a thread
If you have trouble getting the files out of the newsgroup. Some of the files of interest can also be found on the main machine in the /home/vonronne/public-cs5363 directory of the main machines. This was updated on 10/5/09, but may not be updated as frequently as the newsgroup in the future.