Some random notes about the Debian INN 2.X package.  

If you are upgrading from a previous version, please review the information
near the top of the NEWS file to learn what has changed, and what you may
need to do to update your system.  

If you plan to use INN at home you should really consider running INN 1.x,
which you can find in the inn package.

INN 2.X is substantially different in terms of configuration file contents
and filesystem layout than previous versions.  The Debian INN package installs
a minimal but functional local-only server configuration.  Configuring feeds
to/from other servers, and many other details, is up to you.

You will want to review the information in /usr/share/doc/inn2 to get started
on configuring the installation for your needs.  All of the configuration files
in /etc/news are flagged as 'conffiles' in the packaging system, so your work
should not be overwritten without your permission if/when you upgrade the inn 
package in the future.  In particular, make sure to update /etc/news/inn.conf
to put in your organization name and related information before you establish
any network connections if you don't want to be embarrassed.

Also, if you are moving over from INN 1.X, please note that the directory 
structure under /var/spool/news has changed.  At a minimum, you will need to 
move the article database subdirectories from /var/spool/news to 
/var/spool/news/articles.  The set of directories that belong in 
/var/spool/news for 2.2.2 and later are:

	archive articles incoming innfeed outgoing overview

Anything else is left over from a previous version, and probably should be 
moved or removed.

It has been pointed out that inn2's use of /etc/cron.d/inn2 instead of 
separate files in /etc/cron.daily and so forth poses a problem for users of
anacron on boxes that are not run continuously.  Since the primary target
for an INN installation is a fully-connected system that might easily need
a variety of cron entries with different intervals, I don't intend to change
this default.  However, if you're bothered by this, feel free to change the
cron configuration to suite your needs.

If you want to use pgpverify (and you do if you're getting a real feed!),
you can use the /usr/lib/news/bin/buildinnkeyring program to download the
keys for some hierarchies from ftp.isc.org and add them to the gnupg
keyring used by pgpverify.
This package does not support the non-free PGP program anymore.

The program 'compress' is not a part of Debian GNU/Linux due to patent issues
with the algorithm.  By default, the innshellvars* files will try to call
'compress' if you try to transport compressed batches over UUCP.  This will
work if you install the non-free 'ncompress' package.  Since it's non-free, 
this might be as unacceptable to you as it is to me!  If you know that all of
your neighbors can handle gzip, a better solution might be to edit the 
innshellvars* files to use '/bin/gzip -9' for the COMPRESS variable.  I do not
intend to change this default to differ from the upstream source.

Log files in /var/log/news need to be owned by user 'news' for the news 
scanlogs tool to be able to rotate them properly.

If you want to use the ckpasswd program you need to install the libgdbm3
package.


SSL
~~~
To enable SSL you need to start /usr/lib/news/bin/nnrpd-ssl with the -S
flag from inetd or the command line.
See nnrpd(8) and sasl.conf(5) for details.

You need a certificate authority (CA) certificate in
/etc/news/nnrpd-ca-cert.pem. You will also need a certificate/key pair,
named /etc/news/nnrpd-cert.pem and /etc/news/nnrpd-key.pem respectively.

If you do not already have a PKI in place, you can create them with a
command like:

openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -days 1825 \
	-keyout /etc/news/nnrpd-key.pem -out /etc/news/nnrpd-cert.pem

The private key must have the correct permissions:

chown root:news /etc/news/nnrpd-key.pem
chmod 640 /etc/news/nnrpd-key.pem


STARTTLS
~~~~~~~~
STARTTLS support will not work when nnrpd is started by innd using
"MODE READER" unless the nnrpd binary is replaced by nnrpd-ssl (e.g.
by using dpkg-divert(8)).
The upstream maintainer recommends running nnrpd as a standalone process.


Large Files Support
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On 32 bit architectures, the inn2-lfs package is built.
There is no transition procedure, so if you want to convert an existing
installation (this may or may not be possible depending on your choice
of storage and overview formats) then you are on your own.
When attempting such conversion do not forget that the package will
delete /var/{spool,lib,log}/news/ when removed so they should be renamed.