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1 Welcome to INN 2.4!
2
3 This work is sponsored by Internet Systems Consortium.
4
5 Please see INSTALL for installation instructions, NEWS for what's
6 changed from the previous release, and LICENSE for the copyright,
7 license, and distribution terms.
8
9 What is INN?
10
11 INN (InterNetNews), originally written by Rich Salz, is an extremely
12 flexible and configurable Usenet / netnews news server. For a complete
13 description of the protocols behind Usenet and netnews, see RFC 1036 and
14 RFC 977 (or their replacements). In brief, netnews is a set of
15 protocols for exchanging messages between a decentralized network of
16 news servers. News articles are organized into newsgroups, which are
17 themselves organized into hierarchies. Each individual news server
18 stores locally all articles it has received for a given newsgroup,
19 making access to stored articles extremely fast. Netnews does not
20 require any central server; instead, each news server passes along
21 articles it receives to all of the news servers it peers with, those
22 servers pass the articles along to their peers, and so on, resulting in
23 "flood fill" propagation of news articles.
24
25 A news server performs three basic functions: it accepts articles from
26 other servers and stores them on disk, sends articles it has received
27 out to other servers, and offers stored news articles to readers on
28 demand. It additionally has to perform some periodic maintenance tasks,
29 such as deleting older articles to make room for new ones.
30
31 Originally, a news server would just store all of the news articles it
32 had received in a file system. Users could then read news by reading
33 the article files on disk (or more commonly using news reading software
34 that did this efficiently). These days, news servers are almost always
35 stand-alone systems and news reading is supported via network
36 connections. A user who wants to read a newsgroup opens that newsgroup
37 in their newsreader software, which opens a network connection to the
38 news server and sends requests for articles and related information.
39 The protocol that a newsreader uses to talk to a news server and that a
40 news server uses to talk to another news server over TCP/IP is called
41 NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol).
42
43 INN supports accepting articles via either NNTP connections or via UUCP.
44 innd, the heart of INN, handles NNTP feeding connections directly; UUCP
45 newsfeeds use rnews (included in INN) to hand articles off to innd.
46 Other parts of INN handle feeding articles out to other news servers,
47 most commonly innfeed (for real-time outgoing feeds) or nntpsend and
48 innxmit (used to send batches of news created by innd to a remote site
49 via TCP/IP). INN can also handle outgoing UUCP feeds.
50
51 The part of INN that handles connections from newsreaders is nnrpd.
52
53 Also included in INN are a wide variety of supporting programs to handle
54 periodic maintenance and recovery from crashes, process special control
55 messages, maintain the list of active newsgroups, and generate and
56 record a staggering variety of statistics and summary information on the
57 usage and performance of the server.
58
59 INN also supports an extremely powerful filtering system that allows the
60 server administrator to reject unwanted articles (such as spam and other
61 abuses of Usenet).
62
63 INN is free software, supported by Internet Systems Consortium and
64 volunteers around the world. See "Supporting the INN Effort" below.
65
66 Prerequisites
67
68 Compiling INN requires an ANSI C compiler (gcc is recommended). INN was
69 originally written in K&R C, but supporting pre-ANSI compilers has
70 become enough of a headache that a lot of the newer parts of INN will no
71 longer compile with a non-ANSI compiler. gcc itself will compile with
72 most vendor non-ANSI compilers, however, so if you're stuck with one,
73 installing gcc is highly recommended. Not only will it let you build
74 INN, it will make installing lots of other software much easier. You
75 may also need GNU make (particularly if your system make is
76 BSD-derived), although most SysV make programs should work fine.
77 Compiling INN also currently requires a yacc implementation (bison will
78 do fine).
79
80 INN uses GNU autoconf to probe the capabilities of your system, and
81 therefore should compile on nearly any Unix system. It does, however,
82 make extensive use of mmap(), which can cause problems on some older
83 operating systems. See INSTALL for a list of systems it is known to
84 work on. If you encounter problems compiling or running INN, or if you
85 successfully run INN on a platform that isn't listed in INSTALL, please
86 let us know (see "Reporting Bugs" below).
87
88 Perl 5.003 or later is required to build INN. Perl 5.004 is required if
89 you want the embedded Perl filter support (which is highly recommended;
90 some excellent spam filters have been written for INN). Since all
91 versions of Perl previous to 5.004 are buggy (including security
92 problems) and have fewer features, installing Perl 5.004 or later is
93 recommended.
94
95 If you want to enable PGP verification of control messages (highly
96 recommended), you will need to have a PGP implementation installed. See
97 INSTALL for more details.
98
99 Getting Started
100
101 A news server can be a fairly complicated piece of software to set up
102 just because of the wide variety of pieces that have to be configured
103 (who is authorized to read from the server, what newsgroups it carries,
104 and how the articles are stored on disk at a bare minimum, and if the
105 server isn't completely stand-alone -- and very few servers are -- both
106 incoming and outgoing feeds have to be set up and tested). Be prepared
107 to take some time to understand what's going on and how all the pieces
108 fit together. If you have any specific suggestions for documentation,
109 or comments about things that are unclear, please send them to the INN
110 maintainers (see "Reporting Bugs" below).
111
112 See INSTALL for step-by-step instructions for setting up and configuring
113 a news server.
114
115 INN also comes with a very complete set of man pages; there is a man
116 page for every configuration file and program that comes with INN. (If
117 you find one that doesn't have a man page, that's a bug. Please do
118 report it.) When trying to figure out some specific problem, reading
119 the man pages for all of the configuration files involved is a very good
120 start.
121
122 Reporting Bugs
123
124 We're interested in all bug reports. Not just on the programs, but on
125 the documentation too. Please send *all* such reports to
126
127 inn-bugs@isc.org
128
129 (patches are certainly welcome, see below). Even if you post to Usenet,
130 please CC the above address. All other INN mail should go to
131
132 inn@isc.org
133
134 (please do *not* send bug reports to this address).
135
136 If you have general "how do I do this" questions or problems configuring
137 your server that you don't believe are due to a bug in INN, you should
138 post them to news.software.nntp. A lot of experienced INN users,
139 including several of the INN maintainers, read that newsgroup regularly.
140 Please don't send general questions to the above addresses; those
141 addresses are specifically for INN, and the INN maintainers usually
142 won't have time to answer general questions.
143
144 Contributing Code
145
146 If you have a patch or a utility that you'd like to be considered for
147 inclusion into INN, please mail it to
148
149 inn-patches@isc.org
150
151 in the body of the message (not as an attachment), or put it on a
152 webpage and send a link. Patches included with a bug report as
153 described above should follow the same procedure, but need not be sent
154 to both addresses (either will do).
155
156 Have fun!
157
158 Mailing Lists
159
160 There are various INN-related mailing lists you can join or send
161 messages to if you like. Some of them you must be a member of before
162 you can send mail to them (thank the spammers for that policy), and one
163 of them is read-only (no postings allowed).
164
165 inn-announce@isc.org Where announcements about INN are set (only
166 maintainers may post).
167
168 inn-workers@isc.org Discussion of INN development (postings by
169 members only).
170
171 inn-patches@isc.org Where to send patches for consideration for
172 inclusion into INN (open posting).
173
174 inn-committers@isc.org CVS commit messages for INN are sent to this
175 list (only the automated messages are sent here,
176 no regular posting).
177
178 inn-bugs@isc.org Where to send bug reports (open posting). If
179 you're an INN expert and have the time to help
180 out other users, we encourage you to join this
181 mailing list to answer questions. (You may also
182 want to read the newsgroup news.software.nntp,
183 which gets a lot of INN-related questions.)
184
185 To join these lists, send a subscription request to the "-request"
186 address. The addresses for the above lists are:
187
188 inn-announce-request@isc.org
189 inn-workers-request@isc.org
190 inn-patches-request@isc.org
191 inn-committers-request@isc.org
192 inn-bugs-request@isc.org
193
194 Who's Responsible / Who to Thank
195
196 See CONTRIBUTORS for a long list of past contributors as well as people
197 from the inn-workers mailing list who have dedicated a lot of time and
198 effort to getting this new version together. They deserve a big round
199 of applause. They've certainly got our thanks.
200
201 This product includes software developed by UUNET Technologies, Inc. and
202 by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
203
204 Last, but certainly not least, Rich Salz, the original author of INN
205 deserves a lion's share of the credit for writing INN in the first place
206 and making it the most popular news server software on the planet (no
207 NNTP yet to the moon, but we plan to be there first).
208
209 Related Packages
210
211 INN users may also be interested in the following software packages that
212 work with INN or are based on it. Please note that none of this
213 software is developed or maintained by ISC; we don't support it and
214 generally can't answer questions about it.
215
216 CleanFeed
217 URL: <http://www.bofh.it/~md/cleanfeed/>
218
219 CleanFeed is an extremely powerful spam filter, probably the most
220 widely used spam filter on Usenet currently. It catches excessive
221 multiposting and a host of other things, and is highly configurable.
222 Note that it requires that INN be built with Perl support (the
223 --with-perl option to configure).
224
225 GUP (Group Update Program)
226 URL: <ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gup/>
227
228 GUP provides a way for your peers to update their newsfeeds entries
229 as they want without having to ask you to edit the configuration
230 file all the time. It's useful when feeding peers who take limited
231 and very specific feeds that change periodically.
232
233 inflow
234 URL: <http://www.switch.ch/netnews/wg/netnews-wg.html>
235
236 inflow generates graphs of news flow statistics in real time from
237 INN's logs (things like articles accepted per peer, volume accepted
238 per peer, and the like).
239
240 News-Portal
241 URL: <http://floh.gartenhaus.net/newsportal/>
242
243 A PHP-based web news reader that works as a front-end to a regular
244 news server such as INN and lets people read and post without
245 learning a news reader.
246
247 PersonalINN
248 URL: <http://www.ritual.org/summer/pinn/>
249
250 PersonalINN is a version of INN modified for personal use and with a
251 friendly GUI built on top of it. It is available for NeXTSTEP or
252 OPENSTEP only, unfortunately.
253
254 suck
255 URL: <http://home.comcast.net/~bobyetman/index.html>
256
257 suck is a separate package for downloading a news feed via a reading
258 connection (rather than via a direct NNTP or UUCP feed) and sending
259 outgoing local posts via POST. It's intended primarily for personal
260 or small-organization news servers who get their news via an ISP and
261 are too small to warrant setting up a regular news feed.
262
263 newsx
264 URL: <http://www.kvaleberg.com/newsx.html>
265
266 Serving the same purpose as suck, newsx is a separate package for
267 downloading a news feed via a reading connectino and sending
268 outgoing local posts via POST. Some people find suck easier to
269 configure and use, and some people find newsx easier. If you have
270 problems with one, try the other.
271
272 Supporting the INN Effort
273
274 Note that INN is supported by Internet Systems Consortium, and although
275 it is free for use and redistribution and incorporation into vendor
276 products and export and anything else you can think of, it costs money
277 to produce. That money comes from ISPs, hardware and software vendors,
278 companies who make extensive use of the software, and generally
279 kind-hearted folk such as yourself.
280
281 Internet Systems Consortium has also commissioned a DHCP server
282 implementation and handles the official support/release of BIND. You
283 can learn more about the ISC's goals and accomplishments from the web
284 page at <http://www.isc.org/>.
285
286 Russ Allbery
287 Katsuhiro Kondou
288 <inn@isc.org>