news server question

I have a number of newsgroups that I read regularly and would like an archive of, and a persistant way of viewing them. Basically I use Thunderbird and only want to view unread messages, but there are a number of things that can 'reset' the messages that I've read, (Newserver hiccup, Thunderbird reinstall, complete computer reinstall) and I can't read anything when the news server is down. (Adelphia, happens all the time.) I have a dedicated linux box running Gentoo. I guess that I would want to install a news server on it, but is that what I want to do? Can a news server just grab messages from another server? (I'm not worried about posting; I can always find a way to do that.) I would also want the list of messages I've read to remain consistant.

I've looked at suck and nget, but I'm not really sure what either of them do, or if there's something else with the feature set that I want. Also, I think I'd wrather use a non-graphical news reader to use by being ssh'ed into my box. That way the messages I've read will always be marked as such.

Can someone recommend a news server to use, and a non-graphical news client? (Which it appears to me is what I want.)