You might have a perfectly running FidoNet setup right now, with a tosser that takes care of your complete distribution. Now, you also want to connect to UUCP, and you want to use WaterGate to do this, but you don't want to replace your complete system. This is perfectly possible.
You can configure WaterGate to do all the translation work between Internet/Usenet (in UUCP, SMTP or BAG formats) and FidoNet while your other tosser continues to take care of the distribution to all your nodes and points.
Even more simple and possible is to use WaterGate for the translation of newsgroups and to toss them directly into your message bases for the BBS and not to distribute them to your points or to other nodes.
The best thing to do is to use a different zone for the newsgroups. waterGate will have its own node number and it will be very clear that netmail messages sent to that one address are going to another network, in this case to the Internet.
In your other tosser you also define a user that represents WaterGate, with the correct node number and connected to the necessary areas.
You, of course, have also created a user in WaterGate that represents your Internet/Usenet provider and connected this user to the areas that will be delivered.
If you have now received some newsgroups from your provider, then start WTRGATE.EXE with the correct command line options (UUCP in most cases) to process these newsgroups. The user record for the provider makes it that the newsgroups arrive in the system and the user record for the other tosser makes it that the newsgroups are translated into echomail and sent out again as a .PKT file.
It is also dangerous to just copy all the .PKT files from WaterGate's outbound to your tosser's inbound directory, again because you might overwrite an already present .PKT file.
The best way to solve this is to let WaterGate create an archive, then copy this file to the inbound of your tosser and let your tosser extract the archive when it is ready for it. If it is a good tosser, it first processes all the .PKT files in the inbound directory and then starts to extract an archive, process all the .PKT files again, etc. so problems with .PKT filenames don't occur.
I hear you saying: but archiving takes a long time. You can force the compression factor to 0, so your archiver just puts all the .PKT files together. ARJ has the option -m0 for this. And, since there is no other point or node for which WaterGate has to create archives (with ARJ), it is no problem to change the arguments for ARJ.
If you do want to use ARJ for a node anyway, you might also use the OP1 option to compress for your other tosser and put the special command line arguments there.
On the way back, you can simply copy the .PKT files to WaterGate's inbound, but you probably don't know the names of these .PKT files because these are taken randomly. So, you have to archive everything again.
Don't point WaterGate's inbound directory to your other tosser's outbound directory, because WaterGate processes every archive it finds!
WaterGate is currently not capable of detecting that an inbound .PKT file is for a Mail Tunnel user. So, you will have to route the netmails to the WaterGate system and send all echos as well. You then create the a normal FidoNet style user, connect the areas and set up the MailTunnel configuration in the ROUTE.TDB file.
Future version of WaterGate will have better support for this.
Comments or questions? Send an e-mail to editor@wsd.wline.se.
Last updated 13 October 1996