From: INN FAQ Maintainers
INN FAQ Part 1: General and
questions from people that don't (yet) run INN
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: Table Of Contents for Part 1/9
QUESTIONS FROM PEOPLE THAT DON'T (YET) RUN INN:
The FAQ was written by Rich $alz <rsalz@rodan.uu.net>, was maintained for
a long time by Tom Limoncelli <tal@plts.org>, and then for an equally long
time by Heiko W.Rupp <hwr@pilhuhn.de>.
It is now maintained by the INN FAQ Maintainers Group: James Fidell, Dale Ghent,
Nathan J. These documents would not exist if it weren't for the people that have
submitted questions and (most importantly) answers. THANK YOU ALL!
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.1) What is INN?
For a complete answer, why not read the Usenix paper that introduced INN to
the world? It's available as ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/nntp/inn/inn.usenix.ps.Z
InterNetNews is a complete Usenet system. The cornerstone of the package is
innd, an NNTP server that multiplexes all I/O. Think of it as an nntpd merged
with the B News inews, or as a C News relaynews that reads multiple NNTP
streams. Newsreading is handled by a separate server, nnrpd, that is spawned for
each client. Both innd and nnrpd have some slight variances from the NNTP
protocol (although in normal use you will never notice); see the manpages. INN
separates hosts that feed you news from those that have users reading news. If
you need to support a mixed environment you will have to do some extra work; the
installation manual gives some hints. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.2) I thought Rich Salz
maintains INN ...
Rich did for a very long time ..
From an announcement (<4k5pn3$ii9@paperboy.osf.org>) : I am pleased to announce that the Internet Software Consortium (http://www.isc.org/isc) will be responsible
for future official INN releases, starting with INN1.5. I am sure they
will be posting a notice about their plans here fairly soon. The interest and support (both financial and emotional) they have
given me over the past few years has been immeasurable. It was this
interest, as much as their ability to commit top-flight engineering
talent, that makes me feel confident that I'm leaving "my baby" in good
hands. I will still be involved with INN development, although more in an
archi- tectural and philosophical role (i.e., "do it this way") rather
than programming (i.e., "here's the code"). If you've found INN useful, I'm glad. (By my count several thousand
people still owe me a postcard. :) If you expect to find it useful in the
future, please support the ISC and their efforts. I know I
will. For the postcards, Rich adds in (<565e4r$5v2@paperboy.osf.org>): No no no. James gets the postcard. This means you have to track down
his current physical address; perhaps in-care-of the ISC would work. :)
The rules are actually pretty complicated: Dave Barr added that the postcards for him also should be sent to the
ISC.
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.3) What's the future of
unoff releases?
Q: As Rich no longer does inn - what's the future on unoff releases?
Dave Barr wrote: As it stands now I have decided to stop releasing any more unoff
versions unless someone can convince me otherwise. I am redirecting my
efforts towards helping 1.5 see the light. The code base has drifted
enough already -- releasing unoff5 while 1.5 is trying to integrate
unoff4 stuff would be counterproductive. To put it another way, consider the INN1.4unoff to be under a code
freeze. Only bug fixes (and even then only to unoff-specific code, like
streaming) will be accepted. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.4) Where can I get the INN
software?
The official archive site was ftp.uu.net in the directory
networking/news/nntp/inn. Archie current lists over 30 archive sites; three
other international sites are ftp.univ-lyon1.fr in pub/unix/news/inn,
munnari.oz.au in pub/news/inn, and src.doc.ic.ac.uk in
computing/usenet/software/transport
The latest version is INN 1.7.2 available from !! Note that INN1.5.1 has a security vulnerability. You can find a !! first
patch to this at http://miquels.www.cistron.nl/inn/
Patches for older versions are available from: Patches for INN are at: ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/unoff-patches
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.5) Where can I get the
latest copy of this FAQ?
0. If you are reading this document, then you already have part 1 of it. 1. This nine-part FAQ is available via FTP at any FTP site that carries 2. This FAQ is also posted to news.software.nntp, news.software.b and 3. If you don't find it in one of the above places, then try: 4. A htmlized version can be found under:
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.6) Where may I find
additional information?
The Usenix paper from Rich $alz: The Web site of the new maintainers, the Internet Software Consortium A good overview for those not familiar with news (from Tom Podnar <tpodnar@bones.wcupa.edu>): A FAQ in french - maintained by Fabien Tassin <tassin@eerie.fr> A Usenet/INN hypertext documentation effort by Forrest J. Cavalier III <mibsoft@epix.net> A FAQ in Japanese - maintained by Toshio Hori <toshi@etl.go.jp> Jeff Garzik <jeff.garzik@spinne.com> started to
write a ``INN tuning RFC's important to News: The O'Reilly Book (only for C News ; new version is in work) The newsgroup news.software.nntp; please look around in this group. Often Dave Barr has put together some information about his unoff releases. The overview database with its XOVER nntp extension is described in There is a book from Addison-Wesley called 'Administering Usenet News
Servers' by Jim McDermott and John Phillips (ISBN 0-201-41967-X) which seems to
cover INN and Dnews. This is not clear from the aw web site though. There is no special book on INN out at the moment, but it is said, that Dave
Lawrence and Henry Spencer are currently writing one for O'Reilly. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.7) What machines does it run
on?
If you have socket() and select() then INN will probably run on your machine.
In addition to the common platforms found around the Internet (SunOS and Ultrix,
for example), INN runs on IBM's AIX, Apple's A/UX, NeXT, Solaris 2.x, most SVR4
platforms, BSDI, most free BSD systems (NetBSD, FreeBSD, ...) and a host of
others. It might require a little bit of tweaking of some free BSD platforms
that have really bad shells. INN has not been ported to Windows NT. There are no plans to do
so. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.8) INN must be really
complicated since this FAQ is so long!
No, it's just that the FAQ is very complete. A lot of the material could be integrated into the Install.ms doc. Please post questions to news.software.nntp. Do not send email to the FAQ
maintainers directly. By posting your question, a group of 10 or so people will
be trying to help you. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.9) Can I run C News with
INN?
No. INN handles all article reception, filing, forwarding, and expiration.
You will get a corrupted database if you try to run INN with any other news
system. For testing, you can probably shut down your old system, bring up INN,
and then reverse the process. (INN uses the C News history file and DBZ
database, so if you don't run C News you will have to do some fiddling around
with those files.)
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.10) Can I run NNTP with
INN?
There's a confusion here. NNTP is a protocol, defined in RFC 977. There is
also an implementation of the protocol, NNTP1.5, that many people call NNTP.
When there was only one implementation of the protocol, that was okay, but now
that there are other implementations (for example, INN) it is getting confusing.
It would be as if "sendmail" were named "smtp." Please try to be clear -- do you
mean the NNTP protocol, or the NNTP reference implementation currently
maintained by Stan Barber?
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.11) Can I run the reference
implementation (NNTP1.5) with INN?
The quick answer is no. INN listens on the NNTP port and handles all incoming
traffic. It receives articles, files them, and arranges for them to be forwarded
to your peers. If a site connects that is not listed as a peer (e.g., a local
workstation that does newsreading) then the INN server hands the connection off
to another program that handles just the NNTP commands that newsreaders use. By
default, this is nnrpd (notice the "r"), which implements the NNTP protocol for
newsreaders (for example, it includes the POST command but not the IHAVE
command). Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.12) Can I run INN on my
UUCP-only machine?
Sure. While not designed for this, several people are running INN on machines
that do not have IP-connectivity (such as UUCP-only hosts) and are quite happy
with it. You might want to give it a try, especially if you think you will be
joining the Internet some day. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.13) Suppose I have a 286
machine?
Won't work. INN is designed to be a memory hog; a server that has been up for
a few days while will have a working set size of a few to several megabytes,
although not all of it will be resident. For example, the server keeps the
active file and list of who gets what in memory, as well as all articles that it
is receiving. Unless you can do things like "malloc(64 * 1024)" without pain,
INN won't work on your machine. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.14) Does INN implement NOV,
xthread (trn) or xuser/xmotd (tin) commands?
Newsreaders all need some way to quickly grab data from a range of articles.
trn, tin, nn, and others each developed their own database format, and their own
extensions to the NNTP protocol for clients to read the database. Then, Geoff
Collyer invented NOV, the database to end all other databases. Rather than support a different database format for each newsreader, INN
supports Geoff Collyer's news overview database, NOV. INN includes everything
you need to create/maintain/expire NOV's .overview files. It is very easy to configure INN to use NOV. Read Part 4/9 of this faq:
Subject: Cookbook example of setting up NOV ("overchan") NB: The NOV code in INN
1.3 is buggy. Use 1.4 or higher. The xover command is used for querying the NOV database. The xover command is
very smart in that if the article has been canceled, the data isn't given out.
If the article is so new that it's data isn't in the NOV database, nnrpd opens
the article and digs out the data. xhrd and xpat make every effort to use NOV
data before they dig the data out of the actual articles, thus making them
considerably faster than other implementations. The "xoverview" command does not
exist. If your server supports this command you need to upgrade. What about TRN's xthread command?
The xthread command has code but it is not supported; look at
$inn/nnrpd/nnrpd.h. This code will probably vanish after 1.4. What about TIN's many commands?
Tin commands are not supported. However, other people have added TIN support.
See the next section. Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.15) Is an ident or
authorization protocol supported?
An unsupported patch for nnrpd to add ident support can be found via FTP at
ftp://ftp.csie.nctu.edu.tw/pub/News/packages/nnrpd-ident.tar.gz
It includes patches to add tin's xuser and xmotd commands as well as a list
subscription system. (skhuang@csie.nctu.edu.tw)
Remember: ident information is only as valid as the server you connect to.
Any fool with root access (or anyone with a PC or Mac) can create a bogus ident
server that will give out whatever information they want you to see. It's not an
authorization or identification protocol, it's just informational. The authd protocol is added to nnrpd by <nhiro@isci.kyutech.ac.jp>. In a future release, you will be able to log all POST commands with ident
information if you so choose. (Maybe INN 1.5)
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.16) Does INN do UUCP
batching like C News?
Not as part of the standard distribution. The batching system right now is
better than B News, but Rich has said he will be working on improving that part
of INN in a future release. Christophe Wolfhugel <Christophe.Wolfhugel@grasp.insa-lyon.fr>
has written a package that is very much like the C News batching system,
however. You can find it at ftp://ftp.univ-lyon1.fr/pub/unix/news/inn/contrib/
Version 3 of Christophe's package includes a shell version and a Perl
version. Version 4, not yet planned will only be in Perl. The configuration file
has evolved from older releases in order to support new features like "minimum
batching". Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.17) Help! How do I
configure this beast?
READ AND FOLLOW THE "Install.ms" FILE. This FAQ is meant to add to what
Install.ms says not replace it. Even if a already configured or pre installed
INN comes with your OS, you should at least glance at Install.ms to see where is
what and why. Many people that thought the Install.ms doc was incomplete later re-read the
"First Time Installation" portion and were amazed how much they missed (or just
plain skipped) the first time. You should also purchase the O'Reilly And Associates book on Managing Usenet
to give yourself a good grounding on how to run a site. [Erratum 12 Dec 97: The O'Reilly book referenced here is currently out of
print. See section 1.6 for more information on books on INN.]
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.18) How do I thank the FAQ
maintainers?
If you find this document useful, please consider making a donation to the
maintainer's favorite charity: | The Personal Liberty Fund | PO Box 11335 | New Brunswick, NJ 08906-1335 |
USA
The PLF is a legal and educational organization which helps people in New
Jersey, USA. They have many on-going projects which range from combating youth
suicide to legal advocacy. Their Anti-Violence Project runs a phone hotline for
reporting gay-bashing which helps hundreds of people a year. The PLF is an
all-volunteer organization and couldn't survive without donations. The PLF is
recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt charity. Donations are tax
deductible to the fullest extent of the law (U.S. citizens only). Please write
"INN" in the memo field of the check. Fifteen, fifty, or five hundred
dollars... Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.19) What has Netscape's
Newsserver to do with INN?
Netscape took INN as the original source base for their server and added
their own extensions. As revisions go by they will differ more. netscape did not get any special consideration for INN. Anyone who
wants to commercialize it is free to do so.Read the COPYRIGHT
file. You can get answers to problems with the Netscape Server in snews">news://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.server.news">snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.server.news
[Erratum 12 Dec 97: Netscape appears to have abandoned their INN-based news
server in favor of "Netscape Collabra", which is not based on INN code.]
Go to the table of
contents
Subject: (1.20) How do I submit
additional information for the FAQ?
If you have an addition to the FAQ then send it to the FAQ maintainers group
at <innfaq-submit@blank.org>. Please try to bring your submission in the
style of the actual FAQ (Especially if you submit an entry for part9 then please
follow 9.1). If you put
(along others) 'inn' in the subject, you will get an automatic acknowledge of
receipt.
Newsgroups:
news.software.nntp,news.software.b
Subject: INN FAQ Part 1/9: General
Information
Followup-To: news.software.nntp
Summary: This
article is part 1 of a multi-part FAQ: Part 1: Common questions about INN
itself, useful to people that do not currently run INN.
Posted-By:
post_faq 2.10
Archive-name: usenet/software/inn-faq/part1
Last
Changed: $Date: 1997/12/18 21:42:25 $ $Revision: 1.7 $
INN FAQ Part 2: Specific notes for specific
operating systems
INN FAQ Part 3: Reasons why INN isn't
starting
INN FAQ Part 4: The debugging tutorial (setup of
feeds etc.)
INN FAQ Part 5: Other error messages and what they
mean
INN FAQ Part 6: Day-to-day operation and changes
to the system
INN FAQ Part 7: Problems with INN already
running
INN FAQ Part 8: Appendix A: Norman's install
guide
INN FAQ Part 9: Appendix B: Configurations for
certain systems
Mehl, Chris van den Berg and Stephen Zedalis. Submissions, comments
and corrections could to to <innfaq-submit@blank.org>.
| /rich $alz
| If you're
installing 1.4sec2 or earlier, send yourself a postcard | saying
you should upgrade.
| If you're installing 1.5 or later, for the first time with
INN, | send James the postcard.
| If you're upgrading from 1.4 to 1.5, pro-rate your news volume
| and send us each the appropriate fraction. :)
ftp://ftp.vix.com/pub/inn/
or mirrors which are indicated on http://www.isc.org/inn.html one mirror in
Europe is ftp://ftp.xlink.net/pub/mirror.inn/
and ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/unoff-patches/OLD
Add-ons for INN are at: ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/unoff-contrib
("Add-ons" include "Gup" and other interesting tools)
So look around where you found this if the other parts are also there.
INN itself.
news.answers about every other week.
ftp://ftp.blank.org/pub/innfaq/
Users in Europe may get better response from:
ftp://ftp.xlink.net/pub/news/docs/
http://www.blank.org/innfaq/
...which is generated from the same sources as the text version,
so it should always be up to date.
Dave Barr also maintains an HTML version at:
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/usenet/software/inn-faq/top.html
These are grabbed from news.answers - so they might be a bit out
of date :-(
ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/nntp/inn/inn.usenix.ps.Z
http://www.isc.org/inn.html
ftp://bones.wcupa.edu/pub/misc/nntp.ps
at http://www.eerie.fr/~news/faq.html
at http://www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/userkt.html
at ftp://etlport.etl.go.jp/pub/People/toshi/INN/J/
page'' which is oriented towards the Intel/Linux platform (but not
only of interest for Linux users) at
http://www.spinne.com/usenet/inn-perf.html
RFC 977: NNTP (Phil Lapsley and Brian Kantor)
RFC 1036: Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages
(M.Horton, Rick Adams)
Managing UUCP and Usenet (Tim O'Reilly and Grace Todino)
This book seems to be no longer in print, so O'Reilly probably
has no book about Usenet at the moment.
you'll find there the answer to the question you were going to ask.
But don't hesitate to ask.
If you can't post to news.software.nntp you can send mail to
inn-questions@pilhuhn.de which will post the your mail in that group.
This page is also a entry for the patch archive:
<http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~barr/INN.html>
ftp://ftp.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-barber-nntp-imp-01.txt
This is superseded by draft-barber-nntp-imp-02.txt on the same site.
and will be superseded by version 3 soon, which you also might get from
ftp://ftp.academ.com/pub/nntp/private/nntp.extensions.draft.txt
(This one is now at the 4th update)
However, someone has written a package called NNS (Usenet Network News
Server) which is a NNTP-compliant news server for Windows NT. For information
write to nns@jeck.wa.com. (Note that NNS does not appear to be actively
maintained at the moment. Other NNTP servers for NT include Microsoft Exchange,
Netscape Collabra and DNEWS.)
On the other hand -- if you have a solution that
should be included, then send it to the maintainer, so that he can't miss it in
the news.
See also 1.20 and 9.1.
You can run the reference implementation server instead of nnrpd if
you want. Doing this can be useful if you have clients that want to do both
reading and article transfer.
You only need
Geoff's distribution (available via FTP on ftp.std.com src/news/nov.dist.tar.Z)
if you want to see how he implements things, or to get his client library
(useful when building some newsreaders).
This
unsupported patch can be found in ftp://ftp.eos.hokudai.ac.jp/pub/network/news/inn/patches/authd-patch-1.3.tar.gz
The documentation is in Japanese. Good luck.
every penny is appreciated!
Rich
$alz adds:
Continue with Part 2...