+++ /dev/null
-Welcome to INN 2.4!
-
- This work is sponsored by Internet Systems Consortium.
-
- Please see INSTALL for installation instructions, NEWS for what's
- changed from the previous release, and LICENSE for the copyright,
- license, and distribution terms.
-
-What is INN?
-
- INN (InterNetNews), originally written by Rich Salz, is an extremely
- flexible and configurable Usenet / netnews news server. For a complete
- description of the protocols behind Usenet and netnews, see RFC 1036 and
- RFC 977 (or their replacements). In brief, netnews is a set of
- protocols for exchanging messages between a decentralized network of
- news servers. News articles are organized into newsgroups, which are
- themselves organized into hierarchies. Each individual news server
- stores locally all articles it has received for a given newsgroup,
- making access to stored articles extremely fast. Netnews does not
- require any central server; instead, each news server passes along
- articles it receives to all of the news servers it peers with, those
- servers pass the articles along to their peers, and so on, resulting in
- "flood fill" propagation of news articles.
-
- A news server performs three basic functions: it accepts articles from
- other servers and stores them on disk, sends articles it has received
- out to other servers, and offers stored news articles to readers on
- demand. It additionally has to perform some periodic maintenance tasks,
- such as deleting older articles to make room for new ones.
-
- Originally, a news server would just store all of the news articles it
- had received in a file system. Users could then read news by reading
- the article files on disk (or more commonly using news reading software
- that did this efficiently). These days, news servers are almost always
- stand-alone systems and news reading is supported via network
- connections. A user who wants to read a newsgroup opens that newsgroup
- in their newsreader software, which opens a network connection to the
- news server and sends requests for articles and related information.
- The protocol that a newsreader uses to talk to a news server and that a
- news server uses to talk to another news server over TCP/IP is called
- NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol).
-
- INN supports accepting articles via either NNTP connections or via UUCP.
- innd, the heart of INN, handles NNTP feeding connections directly; UUCP
- newsfeeds use rnews (included in INN) to hand articles off to innd.
- Other parts of INN handle feeding articles out to other news servers,
- most commonly innfeed (for real-time outgoing feeds) or nntpsend and
- innxmit (used to send batches of news created by innd to a remote site
- via TCP/IP). INN can also handle outgoing UUCP feeds.
-
- The part of INN that handles connections from newsreaders is nnrpd.
-
- Also included in INN are a wide variety of supporting programs to handle
- periodic maintenance and recovery from crashes, process special control
- messages, maintain the list of active newsgroups, and generate and
- record a staggering variety of statistics and summary information on the
- usage and performance of the server.
-
- INN also supports an extremely powerful filtering system that allows the
- server administrator to reject unwanted articles (such as spam and other
- abuses of Usenet).
-
- INN is free software, supported by Internet Systems Consortium and
- volunteers around the world. See "Supporting the INN Effort" below.
-
-Prerequisites
-
- Compiling INN requires an ANSI C compiler (gcc is recommended). INN was
- originally written in K&R C, but supporting pre-ANSI compilers has
- become enough of a headache that a lot of the newer parts of INN will no
- longer compile with a non-ANSI compiler. gcc itself will compile with
- most vendor non-ANSI compilers, however, so if you're stuck with one,
- installing gcc is highly recommended. Not only will it let you build
- INN, it will make installing lots of other software much easier. You
- may also need GNU make (particularly if your system make is
- BSD-derived), although most SysV make programs should work fine.
- Compiling INN also currently requires a yacc implementation (bison will
- do fine).
-
- INN uses GNU autoconf to probe the capabilities of your system, and
- therefore should compile on nearly any Unix system. It does, however,
- make extensive use of mmap(), which can cause problems on some older
- operating systems. See INSTALL for a list of systems it is known to
- work on. If you encounter problems compiling or running INN, or if you
- successfully run INN on a platform that isn't listed in INSTALL, please
- let us know (see "Reporting Bugs" below).
-
- Perl 5.003 or later is required to build INN. Perl 5.004 is required if
- you want the embedded Perl filter support (which is highly recommended;
- some excellent spam filters have been written for INN). Since all
- versions of Perl previous to 5.004 are buggy (including security
- problems) and have fewer features, installing Perl 5.004 or later is
- recommended.
-
- If you want to enable PGP verification of control messages (highly
- recommended), you will need to have a PGP implementation installed. See
- INSTALL for more details.
-
-Getting Started
-
- A news server can be a fairly complicated piece of software to set up
- just because of the wide variety of pieces that have to be configured
- (who is authorized to read from the server, what newsgroups it carries,
- and how the articles are stored on disk at a bare minimum, and if the
- server isn't completely stand-alone -- and very few servers are -- both
- incoming and outgoing feeds have to be set up and tested). Be prepared
- to take some time to understand what's going on and how all the pieces
- fit together. If you have any specific suggestions for documentation,
- or comments about things that are unclear, please send them to the INN
- maintainers (see "Reporting Bugs" below).
-
- See INSTALL for step-by-step instructions for setting up and configuring
- a news server.
-
- INN also comes with a very complete set of man pages; there is a man
- page for every configuration file and program that comes with INN. (If
- you find one that doesn't have a man page, that's a bug. Please do
- report it.) When trying to figure out some specific problem, reading
- the man pages for all of the configuration files involved is a very good
- start.
-
-Reporting Bugs
-
- We're interested in all bug reports. Not just on the programs, but on
- the documentation too. Please send *all* such reports to
-
- inn-bugs@isc.org
-
- (patches are certainly welcome, see below). Even if you post to Usenet,
- please CC the above address. All other INN mail should go to
-
- inn@isc.org
-
- (please do *not* send bug reports to this address).
-
- If you have general "how do I do this" questions or problems configuring
- your server that you don't believe are due to a bug in INN, you should
- post them to news.software.nntp. A lot of experienced INN users,
- including several of the INN maintainers, read that newsgroup regularly.
- Please don't send general questions to the above addresses; those
- addresses are specifically for INN, and the INN maintainers usually
- won't have time to answer general questions.
-
-Contributing Code
-
- If you have a patch or a utility that you'd like to be considered for
- inclusion into INN, please mail it to
-
- inn-patches@isc.org
-
- in the body of the message (not as an attachment), or put it on a
- webpage and send a link. Patches included with a bug report as
- described above should follow the same procedure, but need not be sent
- to both addresses (either will do).
-
- Have fun!
-
-Mailing Lists
-
- There are various INN-related mailing lists you can join or send
- messages to if you like. Some of them you must be a member of before
- you can send mail to them (thank the spammers for that policy), and one
- of them is read-only (no postings allowed).
-
- inn-announce@isc.org Where announcements about INN are set (only
- maintainers may post).
-
- inn-workers@isc.org Discussion of INN development (postings by
- members only).
-
- inn-patches@isc.org Where to send patches for consideration for
- inclusion into INN (open posting).
-
- inn-committers@isc.org CVS commit messages for INN are sent to this
- list (only the automated messages are sent here,
- no regular posting).
-
- inn-bugs@isc.org Where to send bug reports (open posting). If
- you're an INN expert and have the time to help
- out other users, we encourage you to join this
- mailing list to answer questions. (You may also
- want to read the newsgroup news.software.nntp,
- which gets a lot of INN-related questions.)
-
- To join these lists, send a subscription request to the "-request"
- address. The addresses for the above lists are:
-
- inn-announce-request@isc.org
- inn-workers-request@isc.org
- inn-patches-request@isc.org
- inn-committers-request@isc.org
- inn-bugs-request@isc.org
-
-Who's Responsible / Who to Thank
-
- See CONTRIBUTORS for a long list of past contributors as well as people
- from the inn-workers mailing list who have dedicated a lot of time and
- effort to getting this new version together. They deserve a big round
- of applause. They've certainly got our thanks.
-
- This product includes software developed by UUNET Technologies, Inc. and
- by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
-
- Last, but certainly not least, Rich Salz, the original author of INN
- deserves a lion's share of the credit for writing INN in the first place
- and making it the most popular news server software on the planet (no
- NNTP yet to the moon, but we plan to be there first).
-
-Related Packages
-
- INN users may also be interested in the following software packages that
- work with INN or are based on it. Please note that none of this
- software is developed or maintained by ISC; we don't support it and
- generally can't answer questions about it.
-
- CleanFeed
- URL: <http://www.bofh.it/~md/cleanfeed/>
-
- CleanFeed is an extremely powerful spam filter, probably the most
- widely used spam filter on Usenet currently. It catches excessive
- multiposting and a host of other things, and is highly configurable.
- Note that it requires that INN be built with Perl support (the
- --with-perl option to configure).
-
- GUP (Group Update Program)
- URL: <ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gup/>
-
- GUP provides a way for your peers to update their newsfeeds entries
- as they want without having to ask you to edit the configuration
- file all the time. It's useful when feeding peers who take limited
- and very specific feeds that change periodically.
-
- inflow
- URL: <http://www.switch.ch/netnews/wg/netnews-wg.html>
-
- inflow generates graphs of news flow statistics in real time from
- INN's logs (things like articles accepted per peer, volume accepted
- per peer, and the like).
-
- News-Portal
- URL: <http://floh.gartenhaus.net/newsportal/>
-
- A PHP-based web news reader that works as a front-end to a regular
- news server such as INN and lets people read and post without
- learning a news reader.
-
- PersonalINN
- URL: <http://www.ritual.org/summer/pinn/>
-
- PersonalINN is a version of INN modified for personal use and with a
- friendly GUI built on top of it. It is available for NeXTSTEP or
- OPENSTEP only, unfortunately.
-
- suck
- URL: <http://home.comcast.net/~bobyetman/index.html>
-
- suck is a separate package for downloading a news feed via a reading
- connection (rather than via a direct NNTP or UUCP feed) and sending
- outgoing local posts via POST. It's intended primarily for personal
- or small-organization news servers who get their news via an ISP and
- are too small to warrant setting up a regular news feed.
-
- newsx
- URL: <http://www.kvaleberg.com/newsx.html>
-
- Serving the same purpose as suck, newsx is a separate package for
- downloading a news feed via a reading connectino and sending
- outgoing local posts via POST. Some people find suck easier to
- configure and use, and some people find newsx easier. If you have
- problems with one, try the other.
-
-Supporting the INN Effort
-
- Note that INN is supported by Internet Systems Consortium, and although
- it is free for use and redistribution and incorporation into vendor
- products and export and anything else you can think of, it costs money
- to produce. That money comes from ISPs, hardware and software vendors,
- companies who make extensive use of the software, and generally
- kind-hearted folk such as yourself.
-
- Internet Systems Consortium has also commissioned a DHCP server
- implementation and handles the official support/release of BIND. You
- can learn more about the ISC's goals and accomplishments from the web
- page at <http://www.isc.org/>.
-
- Russ Allbery
- Katsuhiro Kondou
- <inn@isc.org>
~ian / innduct.git / blobdiff