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<h1>INN 2.x FAQ</h1>
<p class="subheading">
Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org><br />
Last modified May 23, 2017
</p>
<p>
This FAQ is intended to answer frequently asked questions concerning the
current versions of INN (INN 2.x and later) seen on news.software.nntp.
It should be referred to in preference to the old INN FAQ, which only
documents versions up to 1.7. It mostly covers INN 2.3 and later; earlier
versions of INN may behave differently or use different configuration
files.
</p>
<p>
If you're reading this on Usenet, this FAQ is formatted as a minimal
digest, so if your news or mail reader has digest handling capabilities
you can use them to navigate between sections. In rn variants, you can
use Ctrl-G to skip to the next section; in Gnus, press Ctrl-D to break
each section into a separate article.
</p>
<p>
Please send any comments, suggestions, or updates to <eagle@eyrie.org>.
Bear in mind when sending me e-mail that I receive upwards of 800 mail
messages a day and have unanswered personal e-mail dating back six months
or more, so please don't expect an immediate response. You may receive
quicker responses by posting to news.software.nntp (even, due to the
quirky way in which I read mail and news, from me).
</p>
<p>
This FAQ is posted monthly to news.software.nntp, and is available on the
web at <<a href="https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html">https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html</a>>.
</p>
<h2>Contents</h2>
<ol>
<li>
<p>
<a href="#S1">General Questions</a><br />
1.1. <a href="#S1.1">What is INN?</a><br />
1.2. <a href="#S1.2">What is the current version?</a><br />
1.3. <a href="#S1.3">Where can I get INN?</a><br />
1.4. <a href="#S1.4">Where can I find documentation?</a><br />
1.5. <a href="#S1.5">What newsgroups are there for INN?</a><br />
1.6. <a href="#S1.6">What mailing lists are there for INN?</a><br />
1.7. <a href="#S1.7">How can I support INN development?</a><br />
1.8. <a href="#S1.8">How can I contribute to INN?</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="#S2">Terms</a><br />
2.1. <a href="#S2.1">What is tradspool (traditional spool)?</a><br />
2.2. <a href="#S2.2">What is CNFS?</a><br />
2.3. <a href="#S2.3">What are timehash and timecaf?</a><br />
2.4. <a href="#S2.4">What is overview?</a><br />
2.5. <a href="#S2.5">What are deferrals (NNTP code 431)?</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="#S3">Specific Problems</a><br />
3.1. <a href="#S3.1">INN won't start after a new installation</a><br />
3.3. <a href="#S3.3">The news server isn't keeping up with incoming news</a><br />
3.4. <a href="#S3.4">news.notice is empty and the nightly report is missing things</a><br />
3.5. <a href="#S3.5">INN is running out of file descriptors</a><br />
3.6. <a href="#S3.6">Can't get debugging information out of INN</a><br />
3.7. <a href="#S3.7">Articles aren't being sent to remote peers</a><br />
3.8. <a href="#S3.8">sendmail isn't installed</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="#S4">Error Messages</a><br />
4.1. <a href="#S4.1">innd: SERVER cant store article</a><br />
4.2. <a href="#S4.2">innd: SERVER internal no control and/or junk group</a><br />
4.3. <a href="#S4.3">Modification of read-only value attempted (Cleanfeed)</a><br />
4.4. <a href="#S4.4">tradspool: could not open ... File exists</a><br />
4.5. <a href="#S4.5">Binary posting to non-binary group (Cleanfeed)</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="#S5">Problems on Specific Systems</a><br />
5.1. <a href="#S5.1">INN won't compile on SCO OpenServer / UnixWare / OpenUNIX</a><br />
5.2. <a href="#S5.2">Using raw devices on Solaris destroys the partition table</a><br />
5.3. <a href="#S5.3">Will INN run on Windows?</a><br />
5.4. <a href="#S5.4">Why aren't INN's files where the documentation says they are?</a><br />
5.5. <a href="#S5.5">Running INN on Mac OS X</a>
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
<a href="#S6">How Do I...</a><br />
6.1. <a href="#S6.1">Set up a server with no external feeds, just local groups</a><br />
6.2. <a href="#S6.2">Process a single control message</a><br />
6.4. <a href="#S6.4">Feed all articles on a server to another server</a><br />
6.5. <a href="#S6.5">Rename a newsgroup</a><br />
6.6. <a href="#S6.6">Change the domain used for message IDs</a><br />
6.7. <a href="#S6.7">Use INN without a direct news feed</a><br />
6.8. <a href="#S6.8">Generate MRTG graphs for INN</a><br />
6.9. <a href="#S6.9">Hide the junk and control groups from users</a><br />
6.10. <a href="#S6.10">Modify the body of posts made through my server</a><br />
6.11. <a href="#S6.11">Hide the Injection-Info header</a><br />
6.12. <a href="#S6.12">Run innd and nnrpd on separate ports</a><br />
6.13. <a href="#S6.13">Back up and restore an INN installation</a>
</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>
(Note that some numbers have been skipped. When questions are removed,
the remaining questions are not renumbered to avoid breaking links in
Usenet and mailing list archives.)
</p>
<h2><a name="S1" id="S1">1. General Questions</a></h2>
<p>
Contained in this section are general questions about INN, where to find
it, and things of that sort. It is aimed at the person who is not yet
running INN, or who has general questions about how it works.
</p>
<h2><a name="S1.1" id="S1.1">1.1. What is INN?</a></h2>
<p>
The README that comes with INN has this to say (in part):
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
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 3977
(NNTP), RFC 4642 updated by RFC 8143 (TLS/NNTP), RFC 4643 (NNTP
authentication), RFC 4644 (streaming NNTP feeds), RFC 5536 (USEFOR),
RFC 5537 (USEPRO), RFC 6048 (NNTP LIST additions) and RFC 8054 (NNTP
compression) or their replacements.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
INN is free software, supported by Internet Systems Consortium and
volunteers around the world.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
For a more complete answer, see that file. A full description of what
Usenet and Netnews are is beyond the scope of this document; for a
beginner's introduction, see the news.newusers.questions home page at
<<a href="http://www.tokak.us/nnq/">http://www.tokak.us/nnq/</a>>.
</p>
<h2><a name="S1.2" id="S1.2">1.2. What is the current version?</a></h2>
<p>
The most recently released version of INN is 2.6.1.
</p>
<p>
INN development proceeds in two branches, as with many other free software
projects. The STABLE branch is maintenance of the most recently released
stable version, and only bug fixes are added to it. The CURRENT branch is
the development version of the next release of INN.
</p>
<p>
As mentioned in the next section, when installing a new INN server, you
may wish to download the latest snapshot of the STABLE branch rather than
the current full release.
</p>
<p>
Note that the previous STABLE series for INN 2.5 terminated in the release
of INN 2.5.5 and current STABLE snapshots are based on INN 2.6. You
should therefore read the upgrade instructions in NEWS when upgrading from
a STABLE snapshot before September 12th, 2015 to one dated after that.
</p>
<h2><a name="S1.3" id="S1.3">1.3. Where can I get INN?</a></h2>
<p>
The download site for INN is <<a href="https://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/">https://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/</a>>. In that
directory are the various releases of INN, some additional documentation
(particularly of security holes), the original INN Usenix paper.
</p>
<p>
There is also a snapshots subdirectory, in which you will find daily
snapshots of the INN Subversion repository for the last seven days. The
snapshots with STABLE in the name are the latest versions of the STABLE
branch and may have some additional bug fixes over the current released
version. The snapshots with CURRENT in the name are of the current
development version.
</p>
<p>
Please note: There is no guarantee that a snapshot will even compile, let
alone function well as a news server. In particular, the CURRENT branch
is under active development, and all sorts of things may be broken at any
given point in time. Use snapshots with caution, and don't use snapshots
from the CURRENT branch on any production system unless you're prepared to
debug the inevitable problems in code that's actively changing and not yet
thoroughly tested. (The STABLE snapshots should be fairly reliable,
however.)
</p>
<h2><a name="S1.4" id="S1.4">1.4. Where can I find documentation?</a></h2>
<p>
INN comes with extensive documentation. See the files INSTALL and README
at the top level of the source tree, for starters. In addition, nearly
every program and configuration file has its own Unix man page. The best
place to start is by reading the entire INSTALL file and then from there
discovering which configuration files and programs do what you want to do
and reading their individual man pages.
</p>
<p>
There are HTML conversions of the documentation that comes with recent
versions of INN available at:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
<<a href="https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/">https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/</a>>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
For additional documentation beyond what is distributed with INN, follow
the links suggested in the above page.
</p>
<p>
The documentation that comes with INN is fairly technical in nature and
lacking in some more general details on configuring news servers. Some of
the links off of the INN home page have additional overview documentation
or documentation on how to set up servers for specific roles.
</p>
<p>
Another good resource is the newsgroup news.software.nntp (and the Google
archives thereof) and the archive of the inn-workers mailing list. A link
to the latter is off the INN page referenced above.
</p>
<p>
Finally, the following additional links may be useful:
</p>
<dl>
<dt><<a href="http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html">http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/newsserver.html</a>></dt>
<dd>
<p>
A tutorial on setting up INN aimed at beginners using SCO Unix. While
it's mostly focused on SCO, it may be useful for any beginner to INN
and news servers.
</p>
</dd>
<dt><<a href="http://www.kozubik.com/published/inn_tutorial.txt">http://www.kozubik.com/published/inn_tutorial.txt</a>></dt>
<dd>
<p>
A tutorial on setting up INN on FreeBSD. Contains a lot of
information focused on FreeBSD and its preferred file layout, so may
be easier to follow than the generic instructions on that platform.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>
<h2><a name="S1.5" id="S1.5">1.5. What newsgroups are there for INN?</a></h2>
<p>
news.software.nntp discusses all NNTP-based news servers, including INN.
It's the best newsgroup for technical questions and discussion. The
newsgroup news.software.b is also chartered for such discussion, but it's
essentially dead now. General news administration questions are also
on-topic in news.admin.technical (moderated) and news.admin.misc
(unmoderated).
</p>
<p>
news.admin.hierarchies covers questions of general hierarchy configuration
and is where announcements of new news hierarchies are generally posted.
news.admin.net-abuse.* covers the topic of network abuse and prevention
(including spam), but is not for the faint of heart; it is extremely noisy
to the point of being essentially unreadable without a lot of time and
patience (and a good killfile).
</p>
<h2><a name="S1.6" id="S1.6">1.6. What mailing lists are there for INN?</a></h2>
<p>
There are several INN-related mailing lists:
</p>
<dl>
<dt>inn-announce@lists.isc.org</dt>
<dd>
<p>
Where announcements about INN are set (no posting allowed).
</p>
</dd>
<dt>inn-workers@lists.isc.org</dt>
<dd>
<p>
Discussion of INN development. It is also where to send bug reports
and patches for consideration for inclusion into INN (postings by
members only). 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.)
</p>
</dd>
<dt>inn-committers@lists.isc.org</dt>
<dd>
<p>
Subversion commit messages for INN are sent to this list (only the
automated messages are sent here, no regular posting).
</p>
</dd>
<dt>inn-bugs@lists.isc.org</dt>
<dd>
<p>
Trac tickets for INN are sent to this list (only the automated
messages are sent here, no regular posting). Bug reports should be
sent to the inn-workers mailing list.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>
<p>
To join these lists, send a subscription request to the `-request'
address. The addresses for the above lists are:
</p>
<pre> inn-announce-request@lists.isc.org
inn-workers-request@lists.isc.org
inn-committers-request@lists.isc.org
inn-bugs-request@lists.isc.org</pre>
<p>
inn-workers tends to be moderate volume (3-5 messages a day, but varying a
lot depending on what's being discussed). inn-bugs and inn-committers are
occasionally higher volume but entirely automatically generated Trac
or Subversion notifications. inn-announce is a low-volume moderated list
containing only major announcements.
</p>
<h2><a name="S1.7" id="S1.7">1.7. How can I support INN development?</a></h2>
<p>
There are four major ways. First, like with any other free software
project, a great way to support INN development is to join in yourself.
If you know how to program and have an interest in working on a widely
deployed and fairly intricate news server, we'd love to have your help.
See the next question for more details.
</p>
<p>
Second, even if you don't have the time or expertise to write much code,
any contributions of documentation are <strong>greatly</strong> appreciated. There's
always documentation work to be done, from maintenance of INN's technical
documentation to tutorials and overviews for the new user or the user who
wants to do something specific. Listen on news.software.nntp for what
people are looking for, or ask on inn-workers. Similarly, beta testers
are always welcome; if you have a test news server and some knowledge of
how to diagnose server problems and want to try out the current
development code and report any bugs you run into, that helps the
developers immensely.
</p>
<p>
Third, there are always more questions from new INN users to answer.
news.software.nntp gets a regular stream of them, and it's a great way to
help out intermittantly when you have a few moments to read news. If you
can identify general solutions to frequent problems and pass them along to
the INN maintainers in the form of documentation or suggestions, even
better.
</p>
<p>
Fourth, from the README:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
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 ISP's, hardware and
software vendors, companies who make extensive use of the software,
and generally kind hearted folk such as yourself.
</p>
<p>
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 <<a href="https://www.isc.org/">https://www.isc.org/</a>>.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
The ISC provides ftp and web space and mailing lists and archives.
Donations to help support all of that are greatly appreciated.
</p>
<h2><a name="S1.8" id="S1.8">1.8. How can I contribute to INN?</a></h2>
<p>
First, join inn-workers, since that's where all the development discussion
takes place. The traffic isn't that high.
</p>
<p>
Next, download a snapshot of the INN CURRENT branch as described above so
that you have a relatively current source base to work from. You may want
to check out the current source from Subversion; just point a Subversion
client at:
</p>
<pre> https://inn.eyrie.org/svn/</pre>
<p>
This repository is a read-only mirror that can lag up to an hour behind
the working repository. Read the HACKING file at the top of the INN
source tree for some general information and tips for working on INN.
</p>
<p>
Then pick something that looks interesting to you, mention what you're
doing on inn-workers if it's likely to affect other parts of the
development, and have at it! The TODO file in the CURRENT tree has a
pretty comprehensive list of things that could be done. Best to start
with something small (getting INN to work correctly on a platform where it
doesn't currently and which you have available is often a great start, or
working on one of the supporting programs or scripts that's a bit easier
to wrap one's mind around than the core INN daemons). Patches to INN
should be sent to inn-workers@lists.isc.org, or put on an ftp or web site
somewhere and the URL sent to inn-workers if they're extremely large.
</p>
<h2><a name="S2" id="S2">2. Terms</a></h2>
<p>
Here are definitions of some commonly used terms related to INN. (More
definitions are welcome; this section is extremely incomplete at the
moment and the FAQ maintainer tends not to recognize terms that need a
definition for people unfamiliar with INN.)
</p>
<h2><a name="S2.1" id="S2.1">2.1. What is tradspool (traditional spool)?</a></h2>
<p>
Traditional spool is called that because it's the way that all news
servers used to store articles. A traditional news spool is a tree of
directories matching the hierarchical structure of newsgroups. For
example, the newsgroup news.software.nntp would be stored in a directory
news/software/nntp under the root of the news spool, and next to the
"nntp" directory in news/software would be a "readers" directory for the
group news.software.readers.
</p>
<p>
As of INN 2.3, traditional spool is completely integrated into the storage
API as the tradspool storage method and use the same overview mechanisms
as the rest of INN.
</p>
<p>
Storing articles in the traditional spool format is slow relative to other
storage mechanisms. It's probably nearly impossible to keep up with a
full Usenet feed using pure traditional spool. It is, however, the
recommended storage method for low-traffic local newsgroups and any
newsgroups that you want to back up.
</p>
<p>
For more details, see the INSTALL file.
</p>
<h2><a name="S2.2" id="S2.2">2.2. What is CNFS?</a></h2>
<p>
CNFS is the Cyclic News File System, written by Scott Fritchie. It is a
high-performance method of storing news articles, designed to avoid the
high overhead involved in interacting with the file system when storing
articles in individual files. CNFS stores articles sequentially in
pre-configured buffer files. When the end of the buffer is reached, new
articles are stored from the beginning of the buffer, overwriting older
articles.
</p>
<p>
It's the fastest article storage method in terms of write performance, and
is recommended for storing binaries.
</p>
<p>
For more details, see the INSTALL file.
</p>
<h2><a name="S2.3" id="S2.3">2.3. What are timehash and timecaf?</a></h2>
<p>
These are two less-used storage mechanisms available under the INN storage
API (similar in that respect to CNFS). Both can usefully be thought of as
compromises between the write speed of CNFS and the fine-grained control
over article expiration. INSTALL says for timehash:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Articles are stored as individual files as in tradspool, but are
divided into directories based on the arrival time to ensure that no
single directory contains so many files as to cause a bottleneck.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
and for timecaf:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Similar to timehash, articles are stored by arrival time, but instead
of writing a separate file for each article, multiple articles are put
in the same file.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
timecaf was new in INN 2.3.
</p>
<h2><a name="S2.4" id="S2.4">2.4. What is overview?</a></h2>
<p>
Overview is summary information about articles in a newsgroup that is
returned to news reading clients as a response to the OVER command. It's
a very common extension to the NNTP protocol that allows readers to review
summary information about articles before taking the time (and bandwidth)
to download the entire article.
</p>
<p>
The canonical items of information included in an overview record are the
Subject, From, Date, References, and Message-ID headers of the article,
the byte count of the article, and the line count of the article. Nearly
every server now also returns the Xref header (a list of the newsgroups
carried by the server to which the article was posted and the article
number in each of those newsgroups) as an additional field.
</p>
<p>
Note that with the References and Message-ID headers, the overview record
contains enough information to do article threading. It also contains all
of the fields normally keyed on for client-side filtering (killfiles and
the like).
</p>
<p>
Generating overview information for a newsgroup on the fly would be
prohibitively expensive, particularly for large groups, since the server
daemon would have to find all of those articles and scan them to build the
information. It would also be inefficient, since the overview information
for a particular group will generally be requested many times by different
clients.
</p>
<p>
Any INN server that supports readers must therefore have an overview
method configured. There are three different methods to choose from:
tradindexed, which is the slowest but the best tested and most reliable
and the method with the best recovery tools; buffindexed, which is fast at
writing because it uses preconfigured large buffers like CNFS, but which
is harder to recover; and the experimental ovdb overview method, which
stores overview information in a BerkeleyDB database.
</p>
<h2><a name="S2.5" id="S2.5">2.5. What are deferrals (NNTP code 431)?</a></h2>
<p>
Consider the following situation. You have two incoming peers, both of
which are getting ready to offer you an article in streaming mode. The
first sends you a CHECK <message-id> message, to which you respond
affirmatively (i.e., you don't already have the article). Then, before
that peer sends you the article with TAKETHIS, you receive a CHECK
<message-id> from the second peer for the same message. What response
does INN send to the second peer?
</p>
<p>
If deferrals are enabled (noresendid == false in incoming.conf for that
peer, the default), INN will send a 431 deferral telling that peer that
you may or may not want the article; try again later. Chances are that
when it retries, you will have received the article from the first peer
and you'll just refuse it. But if the first peer dies before it ever
sends you the article, this way you can still get it from the second peer.
</p>
<p>
If deferrals are disabled, INN will refuse the article from the second
peer, which means there's a possibility you'll lose news if the first peer
dies before sending you the article.
</p>
<p>
As a side note, some older versions of Diablo, upon receiving a deferral,
turn around and immediately send the article via TAKETHIS, which is
basically exactly what you don't want. (Chances are extremely high in
practice that the first peer will come through with the article.)
</p>
<h2><a name="S3" id="S3">3. Specific Problems</a></h2>
<p>
This section contains specific problems that are frequently reported when
using INN, and includes fixes or suggestions for fixes. Candidates for
inclusion in this section are any problems reported frequently on
news.software.nntp or inn-workers@lists.isc.org. Contributions, including
fixes, are very welcome.
</p>
<h2><a name="S3.1" id="S3.1">3.1. INN won't start after a new installation</a></h2>
<p>
The most common cause of this problem is that inndstart isn't setuid root
(please note that it only affects versions prior to INN 2.5.0 because
inndstart was removed in INN 2.5.0). inndstart must be installed owned
by root and group news, mode 4550. The ls -l output for inndstart should
look something like:
</p>
<pre>-r-sr-x--- 1 root news 53768 Jan 8 00:47 inndstart*</pre>
<p>
inndstart will automatically be installed with the right permissions if
you run make install as root. If inndstart isn't setuid root, it will log
errors to syslog when it tries to start and cannot. If you aren't seeing
those error messages in syslog either, you probably haven't set up syslog
properly (see 3.4).
</p>
<p>
The other most frequent cause of this problem is not correctly following
the instructions in INSTALL on how to set up the initial history database.
If you run makedbz without the -o flag, the initial history database files
will have names starting with history.n. These files must be renamed to
remove the ".n" before innd will start.
</p>
<h2><a name="S3.3" id="S3.3">3.3. The news server isn't keeping up with incoming news</a></h2>
<p>
Start by looking for the profile information in your nightly report. That
will tell you where the news server is spending most of its time and may
identify the exact nature of the problem.
</p>
<p>
This problem is quite frequently due to using the traditional spool
storage format for news articles. This storage method is now too slow to
be able to handle a full Usenet news feed (although with a more limited
selection of groups it can still do just fine). If your server is
spending a lot of time writing articles and you're using traditional
spool, this is probably the problem.
</p>
<p>
One possible solution would be to switch to CNFS as a storage mechanism.
You can do this simply by configuring CNFS (see INSTALL for details),
changing storage.conf to direct some or all of the incoming traffic to
CNFS buffers, and then restarting INN. Older articles will continue to be
stored in tradspool until they expire, but new articles will go into CNFS.
</p>
<h2><a name="S3.4" id="S3.4">3.4. news.notice is empty and the nightly report is missing things</a></h2>
<p>
You have syslog set up incorrectly.
</p>
<p>
INN logs nearly everything except article trace information via syslog.
It expects syslog to write its log messages into particular files under
~news/log, unless you gave it a different path at configure time (see
the pathlog parameter in inn.conf). You'll need to set up logging of
INN-related log messages in your system /etc/syslog.conf. See the
"Configuring syslog" section in INSTALL.
</p>
<p>
Note that you don't have to worry about rotating these log files;
news.daily (which should be run nightly from cron) will take care of that
and innreport generates a daily summary report from them.
</p>
<h2><a name="S3.5" id="S3.5">3.5. INN is running out of file descriptors</a></h2>
<p>
You may need to increase your system file descriptor limits. See the
"File Descriptor Limits" section of INSTALL for more details. This is
particularly a concern on Solaris systems, since Solaris by default has an
exceptionally low file descriptor limit.
</p>
<h2><a name="S3.6" id="S3.6">3.6. Can't get debugging information out of INN</a></h2>
<p>
The INN startup process is quite complicated, involving the rc.news shell
script (and the setuid inndstart wrapper for versions of INN prior to 2.5.0).
This can make it rather difficult to get enough debugging information out
of it to determine what's going wrong if it's crashing immediately after
startup or otherwise having serious difficulties.
</p>
<p>
One approach is to run innd by hand directly, giving it the -d option.
This requires setting up a configuration where innd doesn't need to bind
to privileged ports, however.
</p>
<p>
Another, sometimes better option, is move the innd binary to another name,
like innd-real, and put a shell script in its place. Here's an example,
from Kai Henningsen:
</p>
<pre> #! /bin/bash
# allow core dumps
ulimit -c unlimited
# save any output
exec > /tmp/innd.log 2>&1
# who are we running as, anyway?
id
# show exported environment
export
# start innd (don't forget the arguments, or it will complain)
exec strace -o /tmp/innd.strace -f -F /path/to/innd-orig "$@"</pre>
<p>
This starts innd under strace, suitable for debugging startup core dumps
and the like. You can use this as a general model for a variety of
debugging; for example, you could replace the strace invocation with an
invocation of gdb and then start innd from inside gdb with the -d option.
</p>
<h2><a name="S3.7" id="S3.7">3.7. Articles aren't being sent to remote peers</a></h2>
<p>
(This entry is based on a post by Jeffrey M. Vinocur.)
</p>
<p>
Here's how to trace through INN's logs to figure out what's happened to a
particular article. This should help you discover where the process of
feeding an article to a peer broke down.
</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>
First you look in the $pathlog/news file. There should be one line per
article (search for the Message-ID, or they're in order by time of
arrival if you know that).
</p>
<p>
If you don't see a line for the article in question, your innd has
never seen it. For articles being fed remotely, this means your peer
didn't feed it to you. For articles being posted to your server, this
generally indicates some sort of problem in nnrpd.
</p>
<p>
(The only other time you wouldn't see a line for the article in
question is if your innd has seen it in the past, and is considering
this attempt a "duplicate".)
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
Next, look at the second field of the line you've found in
$pathlog/news.
</p>
<p>
If it's "-", then your innd rejected the article. The reason should be
at the end of that line.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
At this point, you should be looking at a line with "+" in the second
field. The article should be on your server at this point.
</p>
<p>
If it's not, either it's been cancelled, or has already expired.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
You're now interested in whether the article was sent to your peers.
At the end of the same line in $pathlog/news, innd puts all of the
peers it thinks should receive this article.
</p>
<p>
If you don't see a peer you expect there, it indicates that
$pathetc/newsfeeds is not configured in the way you think it is.
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
If a peer is listed at the end of the line, the article should have
been fed to that peer.
</p>
<p>
If a peer doesn't have that article, it's possible that the article is
spooled on your system somewhere. Check $pathoutgoing, or the
innfeed spool if the peer is configured to use innfeed. (It's probably
easier to look for error messages in $pathlog/news.notice than to
actually wade around in $pathspool/innfeed.)
</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>
If you're sure the article isn't spooled, and it doesn't show up on the
peer, you have to consider the possibility that the peer has rejected
the article. Alternatively, it's possible that the peer has some
misconfiguration like the ones described above.
</p>
<p>
In either case, if you're sure that the article was offered to the peer
and not spooled, you will need the assistance of the peer's admin to
investigate further. INN does not generally log enough information
about outgoing articles to be able to tell more from your server alone.
</p>
<p>
It may be possible to get a slight bit of information from the remote
server by connecting with telnet (usually to port 119) and issuing
"IHAVE <message-id>". The peer may respond with something like "435
Duplicate" which means that the problem is not likely to be with your
server (it may be still a problem with the article itself). If the
peer responds with something like "335", your server probably did not
offer the article after all.
</p>
<p>
If you really are at a dead end and need to get more information about
what's going on with an outgoing feed, you can switch it from innfeed
to nntpsend (see INSTALL for instructions). You can then run it
manually with innxmit -dv, which will show the full conversation with
your remote peer.
</p>
</li>
</ol>
<h2><a name="S3.8" id="S3.8">3.8. sendmail isn't installed</a></h2>
<p>
Yes, INN really does require sendmail. It uses sendmail to send out the
daily reports and to mail messages to moderators, and it assumes that you
have a program installed as /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/lib/sendmail that
it can use to do this. It does not speak SMTP, nor is it likely to ever
speak SMTP; it's hard enough maintaining a package to speak NNTP.
</p>
<p>
If you need a very simple local sendmail implementation that just sends
mail to a smarthost, there are several available (nullmailer, for
example).
</p>
<h2><a name="S4" id="S4">4. Error Messages</a></h2>
<p>
Explanations of specific error messages, including solutions where
applicable.
</p>
<p>
INN logs nearly all messages to syslog, so in general these error messages
will be found in syslog. If you aren't seeing anything from INN in syslog
at all, make sure that you have it set up correctly (see 3.3).
</p>
<h2><a name="S4.1" id="S4.1">4.1. innd: SERVER cant store article</a></h2>
<p>
You probably have a misconfigured storage.conf. In current versions of
INN, "no matching entry in storage.conf" is added to the end of this
message unless it really is a disk I/O problem, making the cause
considerably clearer.
</p>
<p>
storage.conf(5) has this to say:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
If an article doesn't match any entry, either by being posted to a
newsgroup that doesn't match any of the <wildmat> patterns or by being
outside the size and expires ranges of all entries whose newsgroups
pattern it does match, the article is not stored and is rejected by
innd(8). When this happens, the error message
</p>
<pre> cant store article: no matching entry in storage.conf</pre>
<p>
is logged to syslog. If you want to silently drop articles matching
certain newsgroup patterns or size or expires ranges, assign them to the
"trash" storage method rather than having them not match any storage
method entry.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
One of the more frequent causes of this problem is misuse of the expires
key in storage.conf entries. Read the man page for storage.conf very
carefully if you're using the expires key, since it may not do what you
think it does. In particular, if you have a storage class that specifies
expires with a min-time greater than 0, it won't match any article without
an Expires header (the vast majority of Usenet articles).
</p>
<h2><a name="S4.2" id="S4.2">4.2. innd: SERVER internal no control and/or junk group</a></h2>
<p>
Your active file isn't complete. Either it's been mangled by something or
it's missing some required entries. Even if you're running a small
stand-alone server for internal use that only carries a handful of groups,
there are some pseudogroups used internally by INN that you have to have.
</p>
<p>
Since INN isn't running (it won't start when this error occurs), you can
edit the active file by hand without worrying about stepping on INN's
toes. Make sure the following lines are present in the active file (if
the numbers are different, that's fine):
</p>
<pre> control 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.cancel 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.checkgroups 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.newgroup 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.rmgroup 0000000000 0000000000 n
junk 0000000000 0000000000 n</pre>
<p>
and then start INN again. The control* groups are for control messages
(messages with a named group will be filed into it, and all other control
messages will go into the top-level catch-all group). The n flag is so
that users won't post messages directly to the control* groups; control
messages should be posted to the groups that they affect instead and INN
will refile them automatically based on the Control header.
</p>
<p>
If you have mergetogroups: set in inn.conf, you will also need to create
a newsgroup named "to". Otherwise, you will get the following error:
</p>
<pre> innd: SERVER internal no to group</pre>
<h2><a name="S4.3" id="S4.3">4.3. Modification of read-only value attempted (Cleanfeed)</a></h2>
<p>
INN 2.3 and later have an internal optimization to the interface to
embedded filters that makes filtering about 15-20% faster, but which
disallows a trick that many versions of Cleanfeed use to count the number
of lines in the article. (This problem is fixed in current versions of
Cleanfeed.)
</p>
<p>
To correct this problem, find the line in Cleanfeed that looks like:
</p>
<pre> $lines = $hdr{'__BODY__'} =~ tr/\n/\n/;</pre>
<p>
and change it to:
</p>
<pre> $lines = $hdr{'__LINES__'};</pre>
<p>
The __LINES__ hash value is set internally by all recent versions of INN
and is guaranteed to be correct.
</p>
<h2><a name="S4.4" id="S4.4">4.4. tradspool: could not open ... File exists</a></h2>
<p>
This error generally happens after a crash or unclean shutdown of innd
using the tradspool storage method, and is caused by overview information
being out of sync with what articles are in the spool. When innd was
restarted, it renumbered its active file (which determines the range of
existing articles in each group and therefore what article number is
assigned to new articles) based on the overview information. If there are
newer articles already on disk that aren't mentioned in the overview
(because the overview information for those articles hasn't been flushed
to disk yet), new incoming articles will get assigned the same number as
the existing article and then innd will fail to store the article and
throttle with this error.
</p>
<p>
In INN 2.4 and later when using the tradindexed overview method, you can
solve this problem by rebuilding the overview for any affected group.
Throttle the server (if it isn't already) and then run:
</p>
<pre> tdx-util -R <path-to-articles> -n <newsgroup></pre>
<p>
where <newsgroup> is the newsgroup that INN is complaining about and
<path-to-particles> is the full path to the directory where the articles
for that group are stored (it's generally in the error message).
Immediately afterwards, run ctlinnd renumber for that newsgroup, and then
unthrottle the server.
</p>
<p>
The general solution to this problem, which works with any version of INN
and any overview method, is to shut down the server, delete all of your
overview database, and then rebuild it from your news spool with:
</p>
<pre> makehistory -O -x -F</pre>
<p>
This takes a long time and is to some degree overkill. For versions of
INN prior to 2.5, you will also need to run ctlinnd renumber '' immediately
after restarting INN.
</p>
<p>
A third and better solution in some cases is to just remove all articles
in the spool that have higher numbers than the numbers in the active file.
Here's a Perl script that will do that. Just save this to a file, make it
executable, and run it, giving it the path to the active file as the first
argument and the path to the top of your tradspool news spool as the
second argument:
</p>
<pre> #!/usr/bin/perl
die "Usage: <name> <active> <spool-path>\n" unless @ARGV == 2;
open (ACTIVE, $ARGV[0]) or die "Can't open $ARGV[0]: $!\n";
while (<ACTIVE>) {
my ($group, $hi, $lo, $flag) = split;
my $directory = $group;
next if ($hi == 0 and $lo <= 1);
$directory =~ tr%.%/%;
$directory = $ARGV[1] . '/' . $directory;
if (-d $directory) {
opendir (DIR, $directory) or die "Can't open $directory: $!\n";
while (defined ($_ = readdir DIR)) {
unlink "$directory/$_" if ($_ > $hi);
}
closedir DIR;
}
}</pre>
<p>
If you're not already running INN 2.4, upgrade if you can. Not only can
you recover directly from this problem if you're using tradindexed
overview, but INN 2.4 does a better job of flushing data to disk and is
less likely to have this problem in the first place.
</p>
<h2><a name="S4.5" id="S4.5">4.5. Binary posting to non-binary group</a></h2>
<p>
This message does not actually come from INN. It's generated by
Cleanfeed, and if you're seeing it, that means that you have Cleanfeed
installed. At least at one point, the default Red Hat installation of INN
included Cleanfeed without documenting this particularly well.
</p>
<p>
In order to allow binaries in your local hierarchies, you should modify
the Cleanfeed configuration file to set bin_allowed to a regular
expression matching the groups that should allow binaries. Please don't
allow binary postings to regular Usenet newsgroups that you don't know
should have binaries, as they consume large amounts of bandwidth and
possibly disk space for other sites.
</p>
<p>
For more information on Cleanfeed configuration options, see the Cleanfeed
documentation and the comments in the default configuration file.
</p>
<h2><a name="S5" id="S5">5. Problems on Specific Systems</a></h2>
<p>
Problems specific to particular operating systems or platforms. Look here
if INN doens't behave as expected on your particular system, or if you're
having trouble compiling INN in the first place.
</p>
<h2><a name="S5.1" id="S5.1">5.1. INN won't compile on SCO OpenServer</a></h2>
<p>
On SCO OpenServer, the default cc requires -O be given when -Kalloca is
given (which is added by default by configure since the parsers generated
by bison need it). However, there appears to be a bug in the compiler
that causes it to miscompile nnrpd/commands.c under -O, generating the
error:
</p>
<pre> Assembler: commands.c
aline 1505 : Syntax error</pre>
<p>
I had to get around this by cd'ing into nnrpd, running:
</p>
<pre> make COPT=-g commands.o</pre>
<p>
and then cd'ing back to the top level and running make again. On
OpenServer, to build with cc, you have to use:
</p>
<pre> env CC=cc CFLAGS=-O ./configure --with-sendmail=/usr/lib/sendmail</pre>
<p>
Building under gcc is cleaner, but of course if you want to use
--with-perl you want to build with the same compiler that you built Perl
with.
</p>
<p>
It's also worth noting that with a shared Perl library, Perl on this
platform doesn't apparently generate the right link magic to include the
path to the dynamic Perl libraries. You need to either set LD_RUN_PATH
before building or LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running any binaries so that
they can find the Perl libraries. (The former is preferred, since then
the path is encoded into the binaries and you don't have to remember to
set LD_LIBRARY_PATH later.)
</p>
<h2><a name="S5.2" id="S5.2">5.2. Using raw devices on Solaris destroys the partition table</a></h2>
<p>
If you use slice 2, or some other disk slice that includes the entire
disk, under Solaris as a raw partition for CNFS, you may run into this
problem. The symptoms are that INN manages to initialize the cycbuffs
just fine, but then gets invalid device errors when it tries to open them
again, and the disks show up in format as needing to be repartitioned.
</p>
<p>
The solution is to not use raw devices that include the first cylinder of
the disk. Solaris doesn't protect the superblock from being overwritten
by an application writing to raw devices and includes it in the first
cylinder of the disk, so unless you use a slice that starts with cylinder
1 instead of 0, INN will invalidate the partition table when it tries to
initialize the cycbuff and all further accesses will fail until you
repartition.
</p>
<p>
Generally all that has to be done is to repartition the disk with slice 0
starting from cylinder 1 and extending to the end of the disk and then
point INN at slice 0 instead of slice 2. You lose some small amount of
space, but generally not enough to care about.
</p>
<h2><a name="S5.3" id="S5.3">5.3. Will INN work on Windows?</a></h2>
<p>
It won't out of the box. The standard INN distribution doesn't build on
Windows. It has, however, been built for Cygwin (a Unix-like environment
for Windows) in the past and some of the necessary patches (although
perhaps not all of them) have been incorporated into current INN releases.
</p>
<p>
Search for http://homepage.mac.com/imeowbot/inn/ at
<<a href="http://web.archive.org/">http://web.archive.org/</a>> for the previous work. Don't forget to peruse
INSTALL if you download and want to try this.
</p>
<h2><a name="S5.4" id="S5.4">5.4. Why aren't INN's files where the documentation says they are?</a></h2>
<p>
INN's default installation locations are intended to be convenient for
sysadmins adding INN to their system without disturbing other software.
They don't match any of the standards used by various Linux distributions
or other Unix packaging systems. Because of that, distributors who supply
INN packages often rearrange the files and directories.
</p>
<p>
Unfortunately, this is very confusing for system administrators, because
the documentation is not updated to reflect the modified locations of
files.
</p>
<p>
You can always get the details of how your system is configured by looking
in inn.conf at "pathnews" and similar parameters. But for convenience,
here are comparisons of INN's default locations with some of the most
common packages.
</p>
<p>
(Data courtesy of John F. Morse.)
</p>
<pre> DEFAULT DEBIAN
pathnews: /usr/local/news /usr/lib/news
pathbin: /usr/local/news/bin /usr/lib/news/bin
pathcontrol: /usr/local/news/bin/control /usr/lib/news/bin/control
pathdb: /usr/local/news/db /var/lib/news
pathetc: /usr/local/news/etc /etc/news
pathfilter: /usr/local/news/bin/filter /etc/news/filter
pathhttp: /usr/local/news/http /var/www/inn
pathlog: /usr/local/news/log /var/log/news
pathrun: /usr/local/news/run /run/news
pathtmp: /usr/local/news/tmp /var/spool/news/incoming/tmp
pathspool: /usr/local/news/spool /var/spool/news
patharchive: /usr/local/news/spool/archive /var/spool/news/archive
patharticles: /usr/local/news/spool/articles /var/spool/news/articles
pathincoming: /usr/local/news/spool/incoming /var/spool/news/incoming
pathoutgoing: /usr/local/news/spool/outgoing /var/spool/news/outgoing
pathoverview: /usr/local/news/spool/overview /var/spool/news/overview</pre>
<pre> DEFAULT FEDORA
pathnews: /usr/local/news /usr/libexec/news
pathbin: /usr/local/news/bin /usr/libexec/news
pathcontrol: /usr/local/news/bin/control /usr/libexec/news/control
pathdb: /usr/local/news/db /var/lib/news
pathetc: /usr/local/news/etc /etc/news
pathfilter: /usr/local/news/bin/filter /usr/libexec/news/filter
pathhttp: /usr/local/news/http /var/lib/news/http
pathlog: /usr/local/news/log /var/log/news
pathrun: /usr/local/news/run /run/news
pathtmp: /usr/local/news/tmp /var/lib/news/tmp
pathspool: /usr/local/news/spool /var/spool/news
patharchive: /usr/local/news/spool/archive /var/spool/news/archive
patharticles: /usr/local/news/spool/articles /var/spool/news/articles
pathincoming: /usr/local/news/spool/incoming /var/spool/news/incoming
pathoutgoing: /usr/local/news/spool/outgoing /var/spool/news/outgoing
pathoverview: /usr/local/news/spool/overview /var/spool/news/overview</pre>
<p>
In addition, the FreeBSD port uses the standard INN paths except that it
puts logs in /var/log/news and pathtmp in /usr/local/news/spool/tmp.
</p>
<p>
Most packages install INN's man pages into a system man directory
(/usr/share/man or /usr/local/man) rather than into a separate man
directory under news's home directory.
</p>
<h2><a name="S5.5" id="S5.5">5.5. Running INN on Mac OS X</a></h2>
<p>
Richard Tobin provided the following advice in news.software.nntp on
2013-06-29 based on experience with running INN on Snow Leopard:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Mac OS X, at least through the GUI, won't let you create a group with
the same name as a user. So you can't use "news" for both.
</p>
<p>
The Perl module GD isn't installed by default. GPG is not installed
by default.
</p>
<p>
You probably want to turn off Spotlight for the news spool directory.
</p>
<p>
Configure didn't get the Perl compile flags right. PERL_CPPFLAGS had
"-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc", but on this x86_64 machine the
files for the other architectures don't seem to be installed. I
edited Makefile.global by hand to remove them.
</p>
<p>
I needed to tell the application firewall to allow innd to accept
incoming connections. (A window pops up to ask you, but this doesn't
help when you're connected by ssh!)
</p>
<p>
When I ran rc.news form a terminal window, it stopped working when I
logged out. This is because of MacOS's convoluted and undocumented
way of doing DNS lookups. Using "nohup" fixed it -- not because of
anything to do with SIGHUP, but because nohup calls an undocumented
function related to "vprocmgr". Running from launchd shouldn't have
this problem, and it appears to be fixed in Mountain Lion.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
The Perl flags come from the Perl configuration, so this problem may be
fixed with newer builds of Mac OS X.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6" id="S6">6. How Do I...</a></h2>
<p>
This section documents various common or uncommon tasks or configurations
that people want to do with INN. It is mostly taken from frequently asked
questions in news.software.nntp.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.1" id="S6.1">6.1. Set up a server with no external feeds, just local groups</a></h2>
<p>
The basic steps are to set up a newsfeeds file empty except for internal
feeds like controlchan or overchan (if you're using either), have only
localhost in incoming.conf, and start INN with the default minimal active
file. Then, create the groups you want to carry with ctlinnd newgroup.
Set up reading permissions using readers.conf as appropriate for your
organization.
</p>
<p>
In other words, it's very much like setting up any other instance of INN,
but you don't bother with innfeed, nntpsend, or any of their configuration
files. INN may also complain that you have no feeds in newsfeeds; this is
harmless and can be ignored.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.2" id="S6.2">6.2. Process a single control message</a></h2>
<p>
To process a single control message, you can use controlchan from the
command line. Just type either:
</p>
<pre> echo /path/to/article-file | controlchan</pre>
<p>
or:
</p>
<pre> echo @token@ | controlchan</pre>
<p>
if you have the storage API token of the article. (This assumes
controlchan is in a directory in your path.) This is useful mostly for
testing; if you just want to create, remove, or change a group, it's
easier to use ctlinnd (newgroup, rmgroup, or changegroup).
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.4" id="S6.4">6.4. Feed all articles on a server to another server</a></h2>
<p>
To feed all articles on an existing server to another one, regardless of
how they're stored on the server, first tell the new server to accept
articles regardless of how old they are (otherwise, INN will reject
articles older than artcutoff in inn.conf) and disable your filtering:
</p>
<pre> ctlinnd param c 0
ctlinnd perl n
ctlinnd python n</pre>
<p>
You may also want to set xrefslave to true in inn.conf and then restart
INN on the new server if you want to keep the same article numbers as you
had on the old server. (It is notably helpful for news clients because
they otherwise get confused by an article renumbering in newsgroups they
are subscribed to.)
</p>
<p>
Next, make sure that the old server is listed in incoming.conf of the new
server, and reload incoming.conf with ctlinnd to pick up that change.
Also make sure that the new server carries exactly the same set of
newsgroups as the old server.
</p>
<p>
You may also want the new server not to propagate the articles it will
receive during this feeding operation, by checking that the newsfeeds
file of the new server is not configured to propagate articles to other
peers or controlchan (otherwise old control articles may be reprocessed).
</p>
<p>
Then try these commands (a variation on commands posted by Katsuhiro
Kondou to inn-workers) on the old server:
</p>
<pre> cd <pathdb in inn.conf>
perl -ne 'chomp; our ($hash, $timestamps, $_) = split " "; \
print "$_\n" if $_' history \
| tr . / > <pathoutgoing in inn.conf>/list
innxmit server list</pre>
<p>
where <pathdb> is the path to the directory containing the history file
(usually ~news/db), <pathoutgoing> is the path to the outgoing spool
directory (usually ~news/spool/outgoing), and server is the name of the
new news server to which you're feeding the articles.
</p>
<p>
In case you wish to only feed articles arrived on the old server
between two dates, you can adapt the previous commands. For instance,
the following commands will feed articles arrived between two given
timestamps (that can be computed with the convdate utility shipped
with INN).
</p>
<pre> convdate -n '15 Apr 2014 20:42 +0200' '16 Apr 2014 12:37 +0200'</pre>
<p>
returns the two corresponding timestamps 1397586540 and 1397644620 that
can then be used to retrieve a subset of articles to feed:
</p>
<pre> cd <pathdb in inn.conf>
perl -ne 'chomp; our ($hash, $timestamps, $_) = split " "; \
my ($arrived, $expires, $posted) = split("~", $timestamps); \
print "$_\n" if $_ and $arrived >= 1397586540 \
and $arrived <= 1397644620' history \
| tr . / > <pathoutgoing in inn.conf>/list
innxmit server list</pre>
<p>
If innxmit stops transferring articles (with for instance an error like
"rewriting batch file and exiting"), just re-execute it.
</p>
<p>
When done, set xrefslave to false in inn.conf again if you changed it and
then either restart INN on the new server (necessary if you changed
xrefslave) or use another ctlinnd param command to set the cutoff value
back to what's specified in inn.conf and use ctlinnd perl and ctlinnd
python to reactivate your filters.
</p>
<p>
Please note that when using xrefslave, this method requires that all of
the articles in your spool have Xref headers. Current versions of INN
will always add an Xref header, but very old versions (earlier 1.x
versions) will only add an Xref header to crossposted articles. If you're
trying to import such a spool, you'll need to modify all of those articles
to add an Xref header.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.5" id="S6.5">6.5. Rename a newsgroup</a></h2>
<p>
INN has no native support for renaming a newsgroup, and doing so is
difficult, so the best advice is to not do this. If there's a way that
you can just create the new newsgroup, encourage people to start using it,
and then remove the old newsgroup, I recommend that. It's much easier.
</p>
<p>
Although it is not a renaming, it is also possible to create an alias.
Articles cannot be posted to that newsgroup, but they can be received
from other sites and treated as if they were actually posted to the
group named after the equal sign. However, their Newsgroups: header
is not modified.
</p>
<pre> ctlinnd newgroup group.to.file.under y
ctlinnd changegroup old.group =group.to.file.under</pre>
<p>
Creating an alias newsgroup is useful in case you want residual articles
received under the old newsgroup name to be filed into the new group.
</p>
<p>
As for a renaming, if it really must be done, it's best if you're using the
tradspool storage method. The newsgroup of an article is stored in the
Newsgroups header and Xref header of the article as stored on disk (and
possibly in Followup-To), as well as determining where the overview
information is stored, and in the case of tradspool is also encoded in the
article's storage token. To rename a newsgroup in tradspool, stop the
server, move the directory containing all of the articles to its
appropriate new location in the news spool, edit every article to change
the old name to the new name in Newsgroups, Followup-To, and Xref, create
the new newsgroup with ctlinnd newgroup, and then rebuild history and
overview with makehistory.
</p>
<p>
The following bit of Perl may help with the renaming (from Jeffrey
Vinocur):
</p>
<pre> #!/usr/bin/perl -wi
my ($src, $dst) = (shift, shift);
die "Usage: $0 oldgroup newgroup [file1 [file2 ...]]\n"
unless(defined $dst);
while(<>) {
s/$src/$dst/g if 1 .. /^$/ and /^(Newsgroups|Followup-To|Xref):/i;
print;
} continue {
close ARGV if eof;
}</pre>
<p>
Note that this may cause some problems if the newsgroup you're renaming is
contained in the name of another newsgroup to which messages in that group
are crossposted. If that's a problem, you may have to use a more
sophisticated script.
</p>
<p>
If any articles were crossposted to other newsgroups, you'll also have to
find and recreate the links in those newsgroups to the new location of the
articles (if the links were hard links and the process of changing the
Xref, Followup-To, Newsgroups headers didn't break those links, you may be
lucky and be able to skip this).
</p>
<p>
If you're using another storage method, this is harder, although with
timehash you may be able to just change the Newsgroups, Xref, Followup-To
headers of the articles in that newsgroup and then rebuild history and
overview as above.
</p>
<p>
One other approach that can be used regardless of storage method is to
refeed the articles to the server into a new newsgroup. This approach
works best if you're also changing news servers at the same time;
otherwise, the message IDs of the articles will already be in history, and
you'll have to change the message IDs of all of the messages or remove
them from the history database (such as by moving the articles away,
changing /remember/ to 0 so that old history entries won't be retained,
and then running expire to purge them out of history). To do this, get
all of the messages into a directory (by pulling them down via NNTP or
some other method), change the Newsgroups, Xref, and Followup-To headers
to rename the newsgroup, and then create a file containing paths to all of
the articles, one per line. You can then use that file as input to
innxmit, pointing it at the server to which to feed the articles, and if
the articles aren't listed in history on that server and it carries the
new group, they will be accepted into the new newsgroup.
</p>
<p>
Note that if you use this method and something goes wrong the first time,
the message IDs will probably have all been added to history on the new
server and the articles now will never be accepted until those entries are
removed from history again (or all the message IDs changed).
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.6" id="S6.6">6.6. Change the domain used for message IDs</a></h2>
<p>
By default, any message IDs generated by INN will use the domain of the
local system for the right-hand-side of the message ID. In some cases,
this isn't desirable for various reasons (the server may have an internal
name that doesn't make sense on Usenet at large, or one may not want to
expose the name of the server).
</p>
<p>
In INN 2.3.3 and later, you can set virtualhost: to true in an access
stanza of readers.conf and then set domain: in the same stanza, and all
posts coming from connections to which that access stanza applies will use
that domain to generate message IDs. So if you need to change the domain
used to generate message IDs for every local post from your server, just
add virtualhost: and domain: keys to every access stanza in readers.conf.
</p>
<p>
This is really overkill for this option, and eventually the domain:
parameter in inn.conf will probably be changed to allow this to be
modified for the whole server. (Right now, domain: in inn.conf means
something completely different.)
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.7" id="S6.7">6.7. Use INN without a direct news feed</a></h2>
<p>
INN is designed to be used as a regular news server, receiving direct news
feeds from other news servers and sending news directly to other news
servers using the peer-to-peer portions of the NNTP protocol. However,
with some additional software, it is also possible to use INN as, in
essence, a local cache for a news server that you can use to read and post
but which doesn't treat your server like a peer.
</p>
<p>
This configuration is generally called a "suck" feed, because rather than
having news fed directly to your server, you pull it down or "suck" it
from another news server, and because possibly the first and one of the
most widely used packages for doing this is named suck.
</p>
<p>
The software to pull down articles from another server and to feed
articles to another server using post rather than peer-to-peer commands
does not come with INN (INN has a few utilities to do this on a small
scale, but not really anything designed to handle a lot of groups or a lot
of articles). You will need an external package to do this. The two most
popular are suck and newsx; however, both sites appear to be unavailable
as of thos writing. You may be able to find a package in your local
distribution or package repository.
</p>
<p>
Note that current versions of INN refer to articles internally using a
storage API token, not a path name, which is not always what suck or newsx
expects. Read the documentation carefully; you'll need to use a script or
configuration that retrieves articles using the sm program that comes with
INN rather than trying to open files directly.
</p>
<p>
It's also worth noting that INN is a fairly complex package, and while
many people are running it successfully using this sort of configuration
and like having a full-fledged news server available to them, other people
have found INN rather complicated and difficult to configure for a small,
simple personal news cache. If your needs and goals are simple and the
number of groups you're interested in is small, you may be better off with
a smaller, lighter package such as LeafNode or NNTPcache.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.8" id="S6.8">6.8. Generate MRTG graphs for INN</a></h2>
<p>
INN's CNFS storage system has direct support for producing information
suitable for MRTG graphs on the usage of the CNFS cycbuffs. Running
cnfsstat -m <cycbuf> will generate output suitable for MRTG, and running
cnfsstat -p will generate sample MRTG configuration fragments for each
cycbuff.
</p>
<p>
To generate MRTG graphs of the usage of the buffindexed overview system,
try the following configuration fragment:
</p>
<pre> Target[overview-BUFF]: `/usr/local/etc/mrtg/overview.sh`
MaxBytes[overview-BUFF]: 100
Title[overview-BUFF]: BUFF1 Usage
Options[overview-BUFF]: growright gauge
YLegend[overview-BUFF]: Overview Buffers
ShortLegend[overview-BUFF]: %
PageTop[overview-BUFF]: <H1>Usage of Overview Buffers</H1>
<BR><TT>overview</TT></pre>
<p>
where the overview.sh script is:
</p>
<pre> #!/bin/sh
echo "100"
<pathbin in inn.conf>/inndf -o | awk '{print $1}'
echo "0"
echo "overview"</pre>
<p>
This sample configuration is from Basil Kruglov. Note that you can
instead use -n (for total count of articles); in that case, you'll want to
remove the MaxBytes setting above or change it to be some sensible limit
on the total number of articles you receive. You'll also want to change a
few of the other labels in the MRTG configuration.
</p>
<p>
I'm not aware of any packaged solutions for generating MRTG data from
other things, such as incoming or outcoming news flows. If anyone has any
pointers, let me know.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.9" id="S6.9">6.9. Hide the junk and control groups from users</a></h2>
<p>
The junk, control, and control.cancel groups must exist in the active file
for the proper operation of INN, so you can't remove the groups entirely.
You can, however, hide them completely from users.
</p>
<p>
To do this, edit readers.conf, and for each user access group where you
want to hide the junk and control groups, add "!junk,!control,!control.*"
to the newsgroups pattern. In other words, if you have a line like:
</p>
<pre> newsgroups: *</pre>
<p>
just change that to:
</p>
<pre> newsgroups: *,!junk,!control,!control.*</pre>
<p>
If you use read and post patterns instead, do the same for each of them
individually. The groups will then no longer show up on the server for
users to which that access group applies; it will be as if they do not
exist.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.10" id="S6.10">6.10. Modify the body of posts made through my server</a></h2>
<p>
You can't without either making code changes to INN or putting your own
software in the path of incoming posts. This is intentional.
</p>
<p>
Some sites like to try to append a standard signature to all posts through
their service, generally as advertising. This creates the appearance of
users saying things that they didn't, runs the risk of corrupting messages
by appending text without regard to what's in the message, and can
possibly modify messages that arrive via a suck/rpost connection. It also
adds advertising in an obnoxious location, rather than in the Organization
header which is more widely used for that purpose. Accordingly, INN does
not support this, or any other modification of the body of a message from
inside the news server.
</p>
<p>
If you only want to do this for a private hierarchy, the easiest way to do
this (as well as any other modifications and internal filtering that you
want to perform) is to mark all of the groups as moderated and route all
submissions through a script that makes whatever modifications you want
and then posts the messages with an Approved header.
</p>
<p>
If you want to do this in order to advertise your service, please
reconsider. You can add your advertisements to the headers, like many
other news service providers.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.11" id="S6.11">6.11. Hide the Injection-Info header</a></h2>
<p>
There is no built-in support for suppressing generation of the
Injection-Info header. You can, however, remove it from inside a Perl
posting filter. Try using a posting filter like this:
</p>
<pre> sub filter_post {
$modify_headers = 1;
delete $hdr{'Injection-Info'};
return '';
}</pre>
<p>
Note that you have to set $modify_headers to make changes to the article
header effective in the actual posted article. Instead of removing the
header, you can also alter it if you modify $hdr{'Injection-Info'}. If you
only want to alter the host name used in Injection-Info, see the
virtualhost: and domain: parameters in readers.conf.
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.12" id="S6.12">6.12. Run innd and nnrpd on separate ports</a></h2>
<p>
Originally, innd was designed to handle all incoming connections and hand
them off to nnrpd as appropriate. It is, however, becoming increasingly
common to run innd and nnrpd on separate ports for a variety of reasons,
such as wanting to handle connections to nnrpd with a smart network
connection handling daemon like xinetd that can do things like rate
limiting of connections. INN does support this configuration, but be
warned that since you need to run nnrpd on port 119 for most reader
clients to be able to find it, you'll need to tell all of your news peers
to use a different port to feed you news.
</p>
<p>
The recommended alternate port for innd transit-only connections is port
433, which has been reserved for that purpose. If you want to use some
low-numbered port (less than 1024) other than 119 or 433 for innd, you
will need to build INN with the --with-innd-port option specifying that
port.
</p>
<p>
Now, set port in inn.conf to the port you want to run innd on and add
noreader: true (so that innd will never attempt to hand connections off to
nnrpd). Then, restart INN. It will now be listening on the new port.
You should now set up nnrpd to run via xinetd, inetd, tcpserver, or
some other similar network connection handling daemon on port 119. Make
sure that nnrpd is run as the news user, not as root. You don't have to
pass any arguments to nnrpd (unless you want to).
</p>
<h2><a name="S6.13" id="S6.13">6.13. Back up and restore an INN installation</a></h2>
<p>
(This entry is based on a post by Jeffrey M. Vinocur.)
</p>
<p>
For a full backup, you need, at a minimum, to save all of the articles in
$patharticles, the configuration files in $pathetc, and the active and
newsgroup files in $pathdb. If you have any custom filters you've
installed, or a cleanfeed.local file, you'll want to keep that, as well as
any custom authentication programs or files you're using (like a password
file for news accounts). You may also want to save HTML versions of the
news.daily reports, if you've been generating them, and you may want to
look at the first few lines of config.status in your original source tree
so that you can be sure to use the same options to configure.
</p>
<p>
Note that most people only back up those portions of the news spool that
they retain for a long time (like local hierarchies) and don't bother with
all the regular Usenet articles.
</p>
<p>
It's considerably easier to back up and restore articles from tradspool
than any other storage mechanism, and it's quite hard to back up and
restore timecaf or CNFS. Remember that you can use different storage
methods for different articles. I highly recommend saving the hierarchies
you want to back up in tradspool and use the higher-performance storage
mechanisms for news you don't care as much about.
</p>
<p>
To restore a single newsgroup using tradspool and the tradindexed overview
method, you can just restore the articles into the news spool and then
rebuild overview for just that group with tdx-util -R.
</p>
<p>
Otherwise, for more general restorations, compile INN on the new system
with the same ./configure command if you've lost the installation, run
make install, then put all the pieces back where they belong. Now, you
have to run:
</p>
<pre> makehistory -O</pre>
<p>
to rebuild the history and overview databases. When that finishes, cd to
the $pathdb directory and run:
</p>
<pre> makedbz -s `wc -l < history` -o</pre>
<p>
You should now be able to start the server and read and post news to it.
</p>
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