Configuring tin to read a remote news server

Hi,

The news server at my ISP (sonic.net) seems to be dying an agonizing death,
so I'm looking at some other places to get my Usenet fix. I just registered
an account at eternal-september. They sent me an email containing my user
ID and password, plus some server name and port info.

According to their FAQ, all I need to do to access that server from tin
is to create a .newsauth file containing this line:

  news.eternal-september.org <password> <user ID>

And then run tin with the -A option, which I did.

Now I'm getting "authorization failed" messages when I try to connect.
I have a funny feeling it's trying to connect to the sonic.net news
server rather than to e-s, because it asks for my username and password
(which it should already have, otherwise, what's the .newsauth file for?).
By default, my username for sonic news (jwermont) is filled in. Very
suspicious...

Actually, I might have connected to e-s after all, because in my .tin
directory, there's a new subdir called nnrp-virt.nntp.sonic.net. This
contains a couple of files, one called "newsgroups", which is a huge text
file listing a zillion newsgroups, many of which don't look familiar to
me. (I often use the "Y" option while in tin to see what other newsgroups
might be available on the sonic.net newsserver, so I've pored over it
numerous times.) It is time-stamped appropriately (today, at the time I
was fiddling with this stuff). My point is that I might have gotten that
newsgroup list from eternal-september, even if I wasn't able to log in.

There's another file in the nnrp-virt-nntp.sonic.net subdirectory called
"serverrc" - maybe that's where the port number and server name go? I didn't
see any place in the tinrc file where I should put that info.

Note: I log onto sonic.net from a shell client and I run tin remotely. So
I would be accessing the eternal-september server doubly remotely, if that
makes sense. Maybe that's the problem?

Can anyone help??

Thanks,
Joyce