First of all, you should know that there is a special buffer
called *Server* that lists all the servers Gnus
knows about. You can press ^ from the Group buffer to
see it. In the Server buffer, you can press RET on a
defined server to see all the groups it serves (subscribed or
not!). You can also add or delete servers, edit a foreign
server's definition, agentize or de-agentize a server, and do
many other neat things. See Server Buffer. See
Foreign Groups.
See Agent
Basics.
The gnus-select-method variable says where Gnus
should look for news. This variable should be a list where the
first element says how and the second element says
where. This method is your native method. All groups
not fetched with this method are foreign groups.
For instance, if the ‘news.somewhere.edu’ NNTP server is where you want to get your daily dosage of news from, you'd say:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.somewhere.edu"))
If you want to read directly from the local spool, say:
(setq gnus-select-method '(nnspool ""))
If you can use a local spool, you probably should, as it will
almost certainly be much faster. But do not use the local spool
if your server is running Leafnode (which is a simple, standalone
private news server); in this case, use (nntp
"localhost").
If this
variable is not set, Gnus will take a look at the
NNTPSERVER environment
variable. If that variable isn't set, Gnus will see whether
gnus-nntpserver-file (/etc/nntpserver by default) has any opinions
on the matter. If that fails as well, Gnus will try to use the
machine running Emacs as an NNTP server.
That's a long shot, though.
However, if you use one NNTP server regularly and are just interested in a couple of groups from a different server, you would be better served by using the B command in the group buffer. It will let you have a look at what groups are available, and you can subscribe to any of the groups you want to. This also makes .newsrc maintenance much tidier. See Foreign Groups.
A slightly different approach to foreign groups is to set the
gnus-secondary-select-methods variable. The select
methods listed in this variable are in many ways just as native
as the gnus-select-method server. They will also be
queried for active files during startup (if that's required), and
new newsgroups that appear on these servers will be subscribed
(or not) just as native groups are.
For instance, if you use the nnmbox back end to
read your mail, you would typically set this variable to
(setq gnus-secondary-select-methods '((nnmbox "")))
Note: the NNTP back end stores marks in marks files (see NNTP marks). This feature makes it easy to share marks between several Gnus installations, but may slow down things a bit when fetching new articles. See NNTP marks, for more information.