In article <19970804.163339.27@imm.nethotel.dk>, imm@nethotel.dk wrote:
>If I try to post a news-message from knews, then it get posted but immediately
>after knews terminates with the following error:
>
>Error: Cannot perform realloc
>
>There is not core-dump. What can I do to avoid this error?

This may be a bug in knews.  ANSI allows 2 different behaviours for a
request for a zero size allocation via malloc() or realloc() - an
implementation can either return NULL or a pointer to an object of zero
size.  I seem to recall reports on this list about problems with this, but I
can only find vague mentions of xman in my searchable index, so I suspect it
was before the list moved to netbsd.org.

Anyway, you'll have to look at the code, or report it to the author.

>Allthough it is nice to be able to read Usenet news online I would prefer
>to download it and read it offline. Which programs do I have to install,
>configure and run to be able to fetch Usenet news and mail at my ISP?

For mail, POP3 is probably the best answer as someone else suggested.

For news, INN is probably overkill for a small personal spool.  Someone
suggested tin, but this doesn't allow you to queue outgoing news while
offline.  The newsreader slrn <URL:ftp://space.mit.edu/pub/davis/slrn/>
allows downloading of news and offline posting using slrnpull (included in
the standard distribution).  I wrote some of it, so I'm probably biased.

If you want a more generic solution, you might be best off with something
like leafnode <URL:http://www.troll.no/freebies/leafnode.html> which is a
free "sucking" NTTP server I've heard good things about.  I've never tried
it myself (I use slrn over NNTP or on a local INN spool).

Cheers.
Olly