Changes in 2.6.3
* Fixed the selection of the elliptic curve to use with OpenSSL 1.1.0 or
later; NIST P-256 was enforced instead of using the most secure curve.
* A new inn.conf parameter has been added to fine-tune the cipher suites
to use with TLS 1.3: the *tlsciphers13* now permits configuring them.
A separate cipher suite configuration parameter is needed for TLS 1.3
because TLS 1.3 cipher suites are not compatible with TLS 1.2, and
vice-versa. In order to avoid issues where legacy TLS 1.2 cipher
suite configuration configured in the *tlsciphers* parameter would
inadvertently disable all TLS 1.3 cipher suites, the inn.conf
configuration has been separated out.
* Fixed a regression since INN 2.6.1 that prevented articles with
internationalized header fields (that is to say encoded in UTF-8) from
being posted.
* Support for Python 3 has been added to INN. Embedded Python filtering
and authentication hooks for innd and nnrpd can now use version 3.3.0
or later of the Python interpreter. In the 2.x series, version 2.3.0
or later is still supported.
When configuring INN with the --with-python flag, the "PYTHON"
environment variable, when set, is used to select the interpreter to
embed. Otherwise, it is searched in standard paths.
In case you change the Python interpreter to embed, make sure that the
Python scripts you use are written in the expected syntax for that
version of the Python interpreter. Notably, buffer objects have been
replaced with memoryview objects in Python 3, and UTF-8 encoding now
really matters for string literals (Python 3 uses bytes and Unicode
objects).
INN documentation and samples of Python hooks have been updated to
provide more examples.
* When a Python or Perl filter hook rejects an article, innd now
mentions the reason in response to CHECK and TAKETHIS commands.
Previously, the reason was given only for the IHAVE command.
* nnrpd now properly logs the hostname of clients whose connection
failed owing to an issue during the negotiation of a TLS session or
high load average.
Changes in 2.6.2
* A new *syntaxchecks* parameter has been added in inn.conf. It permits
controlling the level of checks performed by innd and nnrpd. Up to
now, only one check can be enabled/disabled: when *laxmid* is
mentioned in the values of this new parameter, INN accepts Message-IDs
that contain ".." in the left part, as well as Message-IDs with two
"@" (such Message-IDs would otherwise be considered as syntactically
invalid). See the inn.conf(5) man page for more details.
The check is disabled by default (*no-laxmid*), which corresponds to
the legacy behaviour of INN 2.6.1 and earlier.
* Use of the ovdb_server helper server is now the default when using the
ovdb overview method, that is to say the default value for the
*readserver* parameter in ovdb.conf is now set to true. It improves
stability and avoids deadlocks, timing issues and corrupted ovdb
databases.
* mailpost now removes empty header fields before attempting to post
articles, and keeps trace of them in the X-Mailpost-Empty-Hdrs: newly
generated header field body. Also, mailpost now sanitizes header
fields with regards to empty continuation header lines. Thanks to
Kamil Jonca for these bug reports.
* A new -z parameter has been added to mailpost to mention a list of
header fields to remove from the gated message. Thanks to Dieter
Stussy for the patch.
* Fixed a bug in inews that was rejecting articles containing header
fields whose length exceeded 998 bytes. This limitation is for the
length of a single line of a header field (and not for the length of
the whole header field, as it was wrongly the case).
* Added support for GnuPG's gpg binary (in addition to gpgv) in
pgpverify. Indeed, gpg still validates signatures made with weak
digest algorithms like MD5 whereas gpgv no longer do. Thanks to
Thomas Hochstein for the patch, which permits validating control
articles for hierarchies that are still using old PGP keys.
* Added similar support for GnuPG's gpg binary in perl-nocem to validate
NoCeM notices from issuers who are still using old PGP keys.
* A few commands listed in the "Control commands to INND" section in
daily Usenet reports were appearing as a mere letter; all of them are
now properly converted to meaningful words.
* The *tlsprotocols* parameter in inn.conf now recognizes the "TLSv1.3"
value (for OpenSSL versions implementing TLS 1.3, that is to say
starting from OpenSSL 1.1.1).
* The buffindexed overview method will now hopefully work properly on
systems with a native page size larger than 16KB.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
Changes in 2.6.1
* nnrpd now uses -0000 as the time zone for Date: and Injection-Date:
header fields it generates. It was previously using +0000, wrongly
systematically indicating a local time zone at Universal Time when
*localtime* is set to false (which is the default) in readers.conf.
The +0000 time zone will now be used only if *localtime* is set to
true and UTC is really the local time zone of the server.
* Julien Elie has implemented in nnrpd the new COMPRESS command
described in draft-murchison-nntp-compress that extends the NNTP
protocol to allow a connection to be effectively and efficiently
compressed. News clients that also support that extension will be
able to benefit from that bandwidth optimization and improvement in
speed. Moreover, using COMPRESS is more secure than TLS-level
compression, as far as authentication credentials are concerned.
* The default value for the *tlscompression* parameter in inn.conf has
changed. TLS-level compression is now disabled by default, to comply
with the best current practices for a secure use of TLS in application
protocols like NNTP. Using the new COMPRESS command is recommended.
* The *tlscompression* parameter in inn.conf now also permits disabling
TLS-level compression with OpenSSL 0.9.8. It previously had an effect
only when OpenSSL 1.0.0 or later was used.
* rnews no longer segfaults at startup when started setuid news. Thanks
to Marcus Jodorf for the bug report.
* Fixed slow nnrpd responses for a few NNTP commands. The TCP_NODELAY
option was unconditionally set whereas only BSD/OS systems needed it.
Thanks to Christian Mock for having discovered that.
* Articles containing a Received: or a Posted: header field are no
longer rejected by nnrpd at injection time.
* Articles containing control characters or whitespace-only content
lines in their headers are now rejected by nnrpd at injection time.
* OpenSSL 1.1.0 support has been added to INN.
* When an encryption layer is negotiated during a successful use of the
STARTTLS command, or after a successful authentication using a SASL
mechanism that negotiates an encryption layer, nnrpd now updates the
permissions of the news client according to the new secure state of
his connection (that is to say auth blocks in readers.conf using the
*require_ssl* parameter are taken into account). Previously, only
connections on a dedicated port (usually 563) were taking benefit from
that parameter. Thanks to Steve Crook for the bug report.
* When a data integrity layer was negotiated during a successful SASL
authentication, nnrpd was wrongly reseting any knowledge obtained from
the client, such as the current newsgroup and article number. This
behaviour now applies only when an encryption layer is negotiated.
* nntpsend now correctly waits until all of the child innxmit processes
exit before it does. It was causing nntpsend to fail to work properly
on systems that use systemd, because when it exits prematurely,
systemd kills all of the processes it launched, including the innxmit
processes. Thanks to Jonathan Kamens for the patch.
* Update from GNU Libtool 2.4.2 to 2.4.6.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
Upgrading from 2.5 to 2.6
The following changes require your full attention because a manual
intervention may be needed:
* The name and location of the pullnews configuration file have changed.
It is now pullnews.marks, located in *pathdb* when pullnews is run as
the news user, or otherwise in the running user's home directory.
This file was previously stored in .pullnews in the running user's
home directory (even for the news user). If you use pullnews, you
need to manually move and rename the configuration file; otherwise, it
will no longer work. Note that the -c flag passed to pullnews allows
specifying another configuration file, if need be.
* The default location of the mailpost database directory has changed
from *pathtmp* to *pathdb*. If you use mailpost without an explicitly
specified database directory (using the -b flag), then you should
manually move your current database files mailpost-msgid.dir and
mailpost-msgid.pag from *pathtmp* to *pathdb*.
* If you have been using TLS/SSL with nnrpd before, be aware that the
default value of a few inn.conf parameters have changed: the server
now decides the preferred cipher (instead of the client), and only TLS
protocols are allowed (using the flawed SSLv2 and SSLv3 protocols is
now disabled). If you want to change these settings, the respective
*tlspreferserverciphers* and *tlsprotocols* parameters can be tuned to
your needs.
* The --with-kerberos configure flag used to add Kerberos v5 support has
been renamed to --with-krb5.
* The --with-berkeleydb configure flag used to add Berkeley DB support
has been renamed to --with-bdb.
* The --enable-ipv6 configure flag no longer exists. IPv6 is now
unconditionally enabled, if available.
* $HOME is no longer exported as an environment variable by
innshellvars, innshellvars.tcl and the Perl module "INN::Config". It
was previously overriding the default user home directory with
*pathnews*. If you use these scripts in your own scripts, you will
have to take care of that change.
* Owing to the implementation of RFC 4643 (AUTHINFO USER/PASS) in innd,
if remote peers have to authenticate in order to feed articles, they
now have to send a username (which was previously wrongly optional),
before sending their password. The mandatory username, though
currently unused by innd, can be whatever the remote peer wishes. In
previous versions of INN, inncheck was already complaining when
passwd.nntp contained an empty username associated with a password.
A manual review of authenticated feeds should then be done so as to
ensure that they are properly working.
* The Injection-Date: and Injection-Info: headers are now generated by
nnrpd at injection time instead of the NNTP-Posting-Date:,
NNTP-Posting-Host:, X-Complaints-To: and X-Trace: headers. Local
scripts that were using (for authentication, privacy, etc.) these now
deprecated headers should be updated. Also note that the Path: header
of locally posted articles can also contain the contents of the
deprecated NNTP-Posting-Host: field.
* The two *addnntppostingdate* and *addnntppostinghost* parameters in
inn.conf have been respectively renamed to *addinjectiondate* and
*addinjectionpostinghost*. innupgrade takes care of the modification
only for inn.conf; a manual change will therefore be needed for
readers.conf, if these parameters are overridden in this file.
* The default values of a few inn.conf parameters have changed to make
use of the vastly expanded storage and RAM commonly available today:
datamovethreshold (from 8192 to 16384), msgidcachesize (from 16000 to
64000), overcachesize (from 64 to 128), and wireformat (now enabled by
default).
The generation of status reports and performance timings are now also
enabled by default: logstatus and nnrpdoverstats parameters, with a
frequency of 10 minutes (status and timer parameters).
* The default value of max-queue-size has changed from 5 to 20, and
use-mmap now defaults to true for innfeed.conf.
If you are upgrading from a version prior to INN 2.5, see also
"Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.5".
Changes in 2.6.0
* The NNTP protocol requires a username to be sent before a password
when authentication is used. innd was wrongly allowing only a
password to be sent by authenticated peers. See the note above for
more details.
* The Lines: header is no longer generated by nnrpd at injection time.
* The Injection-Date: header is now generated by nnrpd at injection time
instead of the deprecated NNTP-Posting-Date: header, when
*addinjectiondate* is set to true. Note that *addnntppostingdate* has
been renamed to *addinjectiondate* in inn.conf.
* The Injection-Info: header is now generated by nnrpd at injection time
instead of the deprecated NNTP-Posting-Host: (when
*addinjectionpostinghost* is set to true), X-Complaints-To: and
X-Trace: headers. Note that *addnntppostinghost* has been renamed to
*addinjectionpostinghost* in inn.conf. The Path: header of locally
posted articles now also contains the contents of the
NNTP-Posting-Host: header.
* A new *addinjectionpostingaccount* parameter has been added in
inn.conf. When set to true, the Injection-Info: header field contains
an additional posting-account attribute that mentions the username
assigned to the user at connection time or after authentication. The
default value for this parameter is false.
* A few headers are now considered as obsolete by nnrpd at injection
time: NNTP-Posting-Date:, NNTP-Posting-Host:, X-Complaints-To:,
X-Trace:, Also-Control:, Article-Names:, Article-Updates:, and
See-Also: headers.
Besides, nnrpd will similarly reject obsolete sendsys, senduuname and
version control messages.
* The presence of a Subject: header field beginning with "cmsg " no
longer causes an article to be interpreted as a control message by
nnrpd at injection time.
* nnrpd no longer differentiates IHAVE from POST. Articles injected
with IHAVE are now treated as though they were injected with POST. It
means that if the previous behaviour of IHAVE was expected, innd
should handle itself the connection instead of nnrpd.
* The name of the pullnews configuration file is now pullnews.marks
located in *pathdb* when pullnews is run as the news user, or
otherwise in the running user's home directory. It was previously
stored in .pullnews in the running user's home directory (even for the
news user).
* Fixed a leak of semaphores when using buffindexed. Thanks to Richard
Kettlewell for having fixed the issue.
* Building with Libtool is no longer optional. The --enable-libtool
option to configure has been removed.
* DESTDIR and non-root installs are now properly supported and
documented in INSTALL. The "make install", "make update" and "make
cert" steps properly obey DESTDIR. Besides, it is no longer a
requirement that the installation step be done by the superuser, as
long as the user executing the install has supplied a DESTDIR value
that points to a writable directory, *and* the person or process
performing the install corrects the file ownerships when INN is
installed on the system on which it's going to run. Thanks to James
Ralston for this support.
* When building INN with Berkeley DB, Cyrus SASL, Kerberos v5, OpenSSL,
or zlib support, no longer add standard locations to compiler and
linker include flags. Such default paths are now added only if
explicitly given to one or more of the --with-bdb, --with-bdb-include,
--with-bdb-lib, --with-sasl, --with-sasl-include, --with-sasl-lib,
--with-krb5, --with-krb5-include, --with-krb5-lib, --with-openssl,
--with-openssl-include, --with-openssl-lib, --with-zlib,
--with-zlib-include, or --with-zlib-lib configure flags (the flags
ending with "-include" and "-lib" are new in INN 2.6.0).
* If the Berkeley DB, Cyrus SASL, Kerberos v5, or OpenSSL SSL and crypto
libraries are found at configure time, INN will now be built with
support for them unless respectively the --without-bdb,
--without-sasl, --without-krb5, or --without-openssl flags are
explicitly passed to configure.
Note that it was already the default behaviour for zlib support when
Berkeley DB support was also enabled.
* The configure flag --enable-reduced-depends has been added to request
that library probes assume shared libraries are in use and
dependencies of libraries should not be probed. It therefore tries to
minimize the shared library dependencies of the resulting binaries on
platforms with proper shared library dependencies. This is not
enabled by default, and is of interest primarily to people building
packages for distributions.
* Building INN with Python support now requires the use of Python 2.2.0
or later as the distutils.sysconfig module used was introduced with
Python 2.2.0.
* The INN test suite driver is now fully synchronized with the upstream
version of the C TAP Harness package maintained by Russ Allbery.
Keeping the INN test suite driver up-to-date will be possible thanks
to a new getc-tap-harness script in the support directory that
automatically fetches the latest upstream changes.
Similarly, the new getrra-c-util script permits keeping most of the
utility and portability functions synchronized with the upstream
version of the rra-c-util package maintained by Russ Allbery.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
Changes in 2.5.5
* New inn.conf parameters used by nnrpd to fine-tune the TLS/SSL
configuration have been added: *tlsciphers*, *tlscompression*,
*tlseccurve*, *tlspreferserverciphers*, and *tlsprotocols*. Many
thanks to Christian Mock for his contribution that permits tightening
the level of security provided by TLS/SSL.
* innwatch no longer creates a child process only for sleeping and then
waits on that process. The forked-off process only died after it had
done sleeping, which caused the INN service to drop into maintenance
state when for instance running under SMF on illumos/Solaris (since
not all processes die within timeout). Thanks to Lauri Tirkkonen for
the patch.
* innd no longer crashes if a channel is supposed to sleep but does not
define a waker callback function. Also, the highest file descriptor
of sleeping channels is now properly updated. Thanks to Petr
Novopashenniy for the bug report.
* Add new -i flag to both cnfsstat and innwatch to specify how many
seconds they should sleep at startup. It will especially be useful in
rc.news so that these scripts are actually started and then sleep by
themselves, instead of being started a minute after innd and therefore
not being properly stopped if "rc.news stop" is invoked during that
minute.
* Add new -f flag to innwatch to specify the configuration file to use,
in case it is not the default innwatch.ctl file.
* Add new -t flag to mailpost to change, if needed, the default
directory to use to temporarily store error messages that are sent to
the newsmaster. Two paths are now tried by default: *pathtmp* as set
in inn.conf, and then /var/tmp if *pathtmp* is not writable.
* When the creation of a newsgroup needed expanding the tradindexed
group index, an already-running nnrpd was not automatically noticing
newly created newsgroups. Richard Kettlewell fixed that issue.
* Fixed flushing of CNFS buffers when using NFS storage.
* Fixed how innupgrade is executed during an update of an INN
installation; on a few systems like AIX, it fails to run because its
taint mode was unproperly declared.
* Several improvements have been contributed to pullnews by Geraint
Edwards: the new -a flag adds the Diablo-compatible hashfeed ability,
the new -B flag triggers header-only feeding, the -m flag now permits
removing headers matching (or not) a given regexp, and rnews reporting
is improved.
* innreport now properly takes into account the time nnrpd spends
writing when using SASL.
* scanlogs now only shows the first 50 lines from error log files.
Otherwise, all of them were present verbatim in the daily report, and
the resulting e-mail could bounce owing to its length. Thanks to
Jeffrey M. Vinocur for the bug report.
* Fixed the use of the legacy AUTHINFO GENERIC command, that has been
broken since INN 2.4.0 (therefore proving readers probably no longer
use that method to authenticate). Thanks to Richard Kettlewell for
having noticed, though, and contributed to tighten the security of the
replies of this command.
* Add the nnrp.access2readers.conf contribution script written by
Jeffrey M. Vinocur to convert old-style nnrp.access file to
readers.conf.
Changes in 2.5.4
* An up-to-date control.ctl file is provided with this release. You
should manually update your control.ctl file with the new information
recorded about Usenet hierarchies.
* A test has been improved in innwatch.ctl so that innwatch no longer
throttles innd when no overview directory exists. You should manually
update your innwatch.ctl file to get this improvement.
* Fixed a long-standing limitation on how controlchan and pgpverify were
checking the signer of control messages. They now properly handle the
case of several UIDs being defined on a single PGP key, as well as the
presence of spaces into UIDs. In previous versions of INN, a few
valid control messages got ignored because of that limitation
(fido.ger.* and grisbi.* were for instance impacted).
* As the name of the radius.conf configuration file shipped with INN for
the nnrpd authenticator against a RADIUS server conflicts with the
libradius package, this file is renamed to inn-radius.conf (innupgrade
takes care of the rename during the update).
* The attributes hash is now accessible to nnrpd Perl posting filter.
As a result, filter_nnrpd.pl can make use of it. Only authentication
and access Perl hooks could previously use the attributes hash.
Thanks to Steve Crook for this addition.
* INN now properly builds fine with flex 2.5.36 (this version introduced
a change of type for a variable used by INN).
* When using funnel feeds, innfeed log files were open forever, which
resulted in empty log files, once rotated by scanlogs. innfeed now
reopens its log files upon receiving a HUP signal; this signal is in
particular sent by scanlogs during log rotation. Thanks to Florian
Schlichting for the patch.
* Exploder and process channels are now reopened when "ctlinnd
flushlogs" is used. Otherwise, they could hold open an already
deleted errlog file. The issue affected in particular controlchan or
ninpaths, running as such channels.
* Fixed a buffer overflow when using imapfeed with more than a million
commands during the same IMAP session. Thanks to David Binderman for
the bug report.
* Fixed a segfault occurring in innd on systems where time_t is a 64-bit
integer. Thanks to S.P. Zeidler for the patch.
* Fixed a segfault occurring in nnrpd when a res block was used in
readers.conf without the program: key.
* Fixed an issue where users were denied posting because of an
overlapping buffer copy in a check nnrpd was doing. Thanks to Florian
Schlichting for the patch.
* Fixed a regression that occurred in INN 2.5.3 regarding the path used
by default by pullnews for its configuration file. Instead of looking
in the running user's home directory, it was looking in the *pathnews*
directory set in inn.conf. Thanks to Tony Evans for the bug report.
* When neither wget nor ncftpget nor ncftp was found at configure time,
the path to the simpleftp substitution program shipped with INN was
not properly set in innshellvars, innshellvars.pl, and the
"INN::Config" Perl module. Thanks to Christian Garbs for the bug
report.
* ckpasswd no longer tries to use the ndbm compatibility layer provided
by Berkeley DB if Berkeley DB has been built without ndbm support.
Also add support for gdbm libraries in ckpasswd.
* Fixed a Perl warning in inncheck; using "defined(@array)" has been
deprecated since Perl 5.16.
* Fixed the occurrence of an unexpected "cant select" error generated by
innd. Thanks to Paul Tomblin for having caught that long-standing
issue.
* When building INN with Berkeley DB support, no longer add -L/usr/lib
to the linker include flags; unconditionally adding it may break the
build on systems using lib32 and lib64 directories.
* On a fresh INN install, motd.innd and motd.nnrpd are no longer
installed by default. Instead, samples for these files are provided
in *pathetc*, named differently so that their default contents are not
displayed to news clients before they get customised.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements (like the
addition in the readers.conf man page of the log: and program:
parameters in res blocks, and the include directive).
Changes in 2.5.3
Please note that the HTML_STATUS compile-time option has been replaced
with the *htmlstatus* parameter in inn.conf. If you used HTML_STATUS,
you should set *htmlstatus* accordingly.
A confusion in the name of a key in innfeed.conf existed in the source
code. Make sure that the misspelled, undocumented *backlog-limit-high*
key is *not* used in your innfeed.conf file; its real name is
*backlog-limit-highwater*. You should rename the key in case it is
present in your configuration file. Otherwise, it will not be taken
into account. You can run inncheck to verify that the syntax of this
file is correct.
It is generally recommended to run inncheck after any changes done to
configuration files, especially with the new improved version of this
script shipped with INN 2.5.3, thanks to the hard work of Florian
Schlichting who added support for the syntax of incoming.conf,
innfeed.conf, readers.conf and storage.conf.
An up-to-date control.ctl file is provided with this release. You
should manually update your control.ctl file with the new information
recorded about Usenet hierarchies.
* When HDR/XHDR/XPAT were used on a new article coming into a newsgroup,
requesting a header not present in the overview database, the first
subsequent OVER/XOVER command did not show that article. A remap of
the overview data file was missing in nnrpd. Thanks to Sam
Varshavchik for the bug report.
* When a header field appeared more than once in an article, it was
missing from the overview data. OVER/XOVER, as well as HDR/XHDR/XPAT
using the overview, were therefore returning an empty field. The
content of the first occurrence is now returned, in accordance with
RFC 3977.
Perl and Python filters for innd now also properly initialize their
header variables with the first occurrence of header fields. (It is
still the last occurrence for the Perl filter for nnrpd.)
* Fixed a possible plaintext command injection during the negotiation of
a TLS layer. The vulnerability detailed in CVE-2011-0411 (and
CVE-2012-3523, specifically for INN) affects the STARTTLS and AUTHINFO
SASL commands. nnrpd now resets its read buffer upon a successful
negotiation of a TLS layer. It prevents malicious commands, sent
unencrypted, from being executed in the new encrypted state of the
session.
* Fixed a regression that occurred in INN 2.5.0 when leading whitespace
characters have been made significant in header field bodies. It
could lead INN to drop articles and throttle itself when running as a
slave because Xref: header fields generated by other news servers, or
even INN 2.4.6, could contain (valid) leading whitespace. Thanks to
Matija Nalis for having caught this bug.
* Fixed an invalid 431 response to CHECK commands when innd is paused:
the message-ID of the article to defer was missing. Also fixed
another issue in the messages innd replied; when an error occurred
during a write on a channel, a trailing extra junk byte was added to
the reply. Thanks to River Tarnell for these bug reports.
* It is now possible to properly generate daily statistics with
sendinpaths thanks to the new -k and -r flags that permit controlling
the interval of days for processing dump files. The new -c flag
permits sending a copy of the generated e-mail to the newsmaster.
Also fixed an issue with statistics that could be missing or
duplicated for a couple of days when monthly sent.
The documentation has been updated and mentions a preferred daily run
of sendinpaths. This script is a complete rewrite in Perl, and is
based on Mohan Kokal's initial work.
* cnfsheadconf now properly recognizes continuation lines in
cycbuff.conf, that is to say lines ending with a backslash ("\").
Thanks to John F. Morse for the bug report.
* The order of CNFS buffers in a metacycbuff is now properly read and
written by cnfsheadconf. There previously was a confusion between
hexadecimal and decimal values. Thanks again to John F. Morse.
* When the -l flag is given to cnfsstat, the cycbuff.conf and
storage.conf files are now reloaded if they have been modified since
the previous output of cnfsstat.
* A single header field line is limited to 998 bytes, per RFC 5536.
innd was previously accepting, and also generating Xref: header field
lines, up to 1022 bytes. Now, nnrpd (acting as an injecting agent)
rejects articles which contain header field lines whose length exceeds
998 bytes. And innd (acting as a relaying or serving agent) no longer
checks that.
* nnrpd advertises the COUNTS, DISTRIBUTIONS, MODERATORS, MOTD and
SUBSCRIPTIONS variants of the LIST command in response to
CAPABILITIES. These commands already existed in nnrpd but RFC 6048
had not yet been published.
* Add support for LIST MOTD in innd. Consequently, the motd.news
configuration file which was previously used only by nnrpd is renamed
to motd.nnrpd (innupgrade takes care of the rename). innd uses the
new motd.innd file in *pathetc* for its message of the day.
* Fixed an issue at configure time that made INN wrongly assume that
OpenBSD (4.6) didn't support Unix-domain sockets. Thanks to Wim Lewis
for the patch.
* Fixed an issue on systems which do not have a working flock(2)
function (Solaris, for instance). mailpost and pullnews are reported
not to be usable on such systems. Many thanks to Dennis Davis for the
bug report.
A wrapper around shlock is now called in Perl scripts. The
INN::Utils::Shlock module has been added for that use.
* Fixed an issue in the Python access hook for nnrpd: it has not been
working since Python 2.5 on 64-bit platforms, owing to a change to
Python's C API, using a new Py_ssize_t type definition instead of int.
Thanks to Raphael Barrois for the patch.
* Improve the stability of the Perl filters for innd and nnrpd: properly
save and restore the stack pointer when needed.
* The Injection-Date: header, when present, is now used by innd and
makehistory to determine the posting date of an article. Otherwise,
the Date: header is used.
* controlchan now imposes a date cutoff on processing control articles.
The *artcutoff* parameter set in inn.conf is used. Otherwise, without
that cutoff, old control articles could be maliciously reinjected into
Usenet, and replayed. (An unsigned Injection-Date: header field could
be added to an article that only had a Date: header field.) A new -c
flag has been added to controlchan to disable the cutoff check, if
needed (usually when manually invoking the program).
* nnrpd no longer adds or updates the Path: header field when an article
is forwarded to a moderator. It could otherwise lead to rejects at
injection time when the article was approved by the moderator.
* The X-Trace: header field was not properly generated when an article
was locally posted. The field mentioning the IP address was skipped,
resulting in a wrong syntax for this header. The local "127.0.0.1" IP
address is now used. Besides, "localhost" is now mentioned instead of
an obscure "stdin" in injection header fields.
* Fixed a bug in the frequency innfeed logs its status: too many
useless lines were written to news.notice. Thanks to Florian
Schlichting for the fix.
* When unset in innfeed.conf, the *dynamic-method* parameter now
properly defaults to 3 (instead of 0) and *use-mmap* to false (instead
of true). These two values were already the recommended ones in the
documentation and the sample file. Note that *use-mmap* is only used
when innfeed is given file names to send instead of storage API
tokens, which is a fairly rare use case.
* innfeed no longer generates an error message (logged in news.err) when
a parameter is not defined in innfeed.conf. All the parameters have a
default value, so there is no need to warn the user if they are not
present in innfeed.conf. Thanks to Dieter Stussy for having reported
this problem.
* Implement an upper limit to the number of file descriptors innd can
handle. At most (FD_SETSIZE-1) file descriptors can be used. This
upper limit now overrides any superior number set with *rlimitnofile*
in inn.conf. Thanks to Steve Crook for the bug report.
* A default timeout on outgoing sockets (using NNTPconnect) has been
added by Florian Schlichting. For a long time, there have been
occasional problems with actsync (and probably other programs) that
would hang until manually killed or restarted.
* The flag -S has been added to innd by Florian Schlichting. When used,
innd reports the errors found in incoming.conf and exits.
* pullnews no longer stops processing newsgroups when an error occur
during its run (for instance when a newsgroup mentioned in the
configuration file is removed from an upstream server). Besides, it
can now use authentication when posting to the downstream server.
A few other minor bugs have been fixed as for the way pullnews counts
the articles.
* Fixed the way innreport handles leap years. It now properly generates
HTML reports; dates were assumed to be relative to the current year,
which may break their computation during for instance the whole 2012
leap year. Please note that no HTML reports have been lost, and that
they will appear when INN is updated to this new version.
* A new parameter has been added to inn.conf to determine whether the
status file that innd can write out (depending on the value of the
*status* parameter) is plain text or wrapped in HTML. It previously
only was a compile-time option, set to true by default. Florian
Schlichting added the *htmlstatus* parameter to provide a configurable
behaviour.
* It is now possible to run a script at the end of the execution of
innshellvars scripts. If a file named innshellvars.local,
innshellvars.pl.local or innshellvars.tcl.local is present and
executable in *pathetc*, then it will be executed by the corresponding
innshellvars script (respectively shell, INN::Config Perl module, and
Tcl). A typical use is to add or override variables.
* Add support for wire-formatted articles in scanspool.
* A lot of work on cleaning old perl4-style code has been done by
Florian Schlichting.
* inncheck now generates a proper non-zero exit value when errors are
found, and allows quiet mode with the -q flag. Florian Schlichting
has greatly improved this script in many regards, especially with a
config-syntax parser for incoming.conf, innfeed.conf, readers.conf and
storage.conf.
* inncheck now properly finds the boundaries of substituted variables in
newsfeeds thanks to Alexander Bartolich.
* docheckgroups no longer uses awk. On a few systems, the script was
failing because of the presence of an old version of awk that has a
limit in the size of the input it can handle. Processing large
newsgroups files was consequently impossible. docheckgroups now uses
Perl instead of awk, which solves the issue reported by John F. Morse.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements. In particular,
the *debug-shrinking*, *fast-exit* and *initial-sleep* keys in
innfeed.conf are now documented. The function "filter_end()", called
when Perl filtering is turned off, is also documented for the innd and
nnrpd Perl filters.
Changes in 2.5.2
The way checkpoints are handled by innreport for innd and innfeed has
totally changed to provide more accurate daily statistics. The first
Usenet report after an upgrade to INN 2.5.2 will probably contain
incorrect statistics for incoming and outgoing articles because the
beginning of the log files that will be used was generated by a previous
version of INN.
A new version of innreport.conf is shipped with INN 2.5.2 but, in order
to preserve any local changes, will not be automatically installed with
make update. The changes are minor and not mandatory for the upgrade.
* Julien Elie has implemented in innd the new version of the NNTP
protocol described in RFC 3977, RFC 4643 and RFC 4644, and innd now
recognizes the CAPABILITIES command. Despite these standards, three
commands (IHAVE, CHECK and TAKETHIS) will continue, for
interoperability reasons, to return a reject code (respectively 435,
438, and 439) when the command contains a syntax error instead of 501.
The mandatory username argument for authenticated peers is not
enforced in INN 2.5.2 but will be be enforced by INN 2.6.0 when it is
released.
Major improvements are:
* innd now has a decent parser for NNTP commands. The parser is more
correct (commands like "IHAVE<mid>", without a space between the
command and its argument, are no longer valid) and allows leading
and trailing whitespaces in commands. innd also now checks the
length of the NNTP command sent by the client. If the command
contains more than 512 bytes (or 497 bytes for an argument), an
error is returned and the command is discarded. After ten
unrecognized commands, innd closes the connection with the
appropriate code (400 instead of 500).
* The output of the HELP command specifies the arguments expected by
NNTP commands, similar to nnrpd's HELP command.
* LIST ACTIVE, LIST ACTIVE.TIMES and LIST NEWSGROUPS now allow an
optional wildmat argument to restrict the results of those commands
to specific newsgroups.
* When using HEAD or STAT with an article number or a range, 412 (no
group selected) is now returned instead of 501 (syntax error).
* Jeffrey M. Vinocur has implemented support in both innd and nnrpd for
whitespace in usernames/passwords provided with AUTHINFO USER/PASS.
They were previously treated as invalid arguments or incorrectly
parsed. innd and nnrpd now treat everything after the first
whitespace character following AUTHINFO USER/PASS, up to, but not
including, the final CRLF, as the username/password, in conformity
with RFC 4643.
* The syntax of message-IDs is now based on RFC 5536 (USEFOR) instead of
RFC 1036. The major change is that quoted-pairs have been removed
from the syntax.
* The Perl and Python filters for innd now check the message-ID of
articles arriving through TAKETHIS. Only CHECK and IHAVE commands
previously used them.
* Case-insensitive matches are now used for distributions, path
identities, IMAP commands, header names, and control commands.
(Newsgroups are still matched case-sensitively.) Message-IDs are
case-sensitively matched, except for history hashes.
* The new Archive:, Archive-At:, Comments:, and Summary: header fields
defined in RFC 5064 and RFC 5536 can be used in innd filters. nnrpd
now checks at injection time that an article does not contain an
Injection-Info: header, that an Injection-Date: header (if provided)
is valid, and that the Path: header does not contain ".POSTED". Note
that INN does not yet generate these two injection fields or include
the new Path: header field ".POSTED" keyword. These new features will
be in the next major release of INN.
* LIST SUBSCRIPTIONS now accepts an optional wildmat argument to
restrict the results of this command to specific newsgroups.
* nnrpd now supports a new LIST variant named COUNTS. LIST COUNTS is a
combination of LIST ACTIVE and GROUP. It returns the same result as
LIST ACTIVE except that the number of articles in a newsgroup is
inserted before its status.
* A new flag has been added to newsfeeds entries: "Aj", when present,
says to feed articles accepted and filed in "junk" (due to
*wanttrash*) to peers based on their newsfeeds feed patterns applied
to the Newsgroups: header as though the article were accepted and all
those groups were locally carried. This is useful if you want to run
INN with a minimal active file and propagate all posts. Thanks to
Andrew Gierth for the patch.
* A new parameter has been added to inn.conf: *logtrash* defines whether
a line for articles posted to groups not locally carried by the news
server should be added in the news log file to report unwanted
newsgroups. The default is true but it can be useful to set it to
false (especially when *wanttrash* is also used).
* The procbatchdir keyword has been added to news.daily to specify the
backlog directory of innfeed. This is useful when several instances
of innfeed are running or when its configuration file is not the
default one.
* sm now supports a new flag, -c, which shows a decoded form of the
storage API token. This was previously done by the contrib showtoken
script developed by Olaf Titz and Marco d'Itri.
* The O flag in newsfeeds now relies on the contents of the
Injection-Info: header field if it is present to determine the origin
of an article. It falls back on X-Trace: if there is no
Injection-Info: header field.
* A new "unsigned long" type bas been added to the configuration parser.
It will properly warn the news administrator when a variable supposed
to be positive contains a negative integer. It will prevent INN from
crashing due to misconfiguration at several places where it did not
expect negative values.
* innxbatch and innxmit now recognize the new 403 code introduced by
RFC 3977 for a problem preventing the requested action from being
taken.
* HDR and OVER commands now return the correct 423 code (instead of 420)
when the current article number is used but the article no longer
exists.
* actsync, inews, innxbatch, innxmit, nntpget and rnews can now
authenticate to news servers which only expect a username, without
password, conforming to RFC 4643.
* The keyword generation code now generates a Keywords: header only if
the original article does not already have one. The generated
Keywords: header no longer begins with a comma. If keyword generation
is set to true in inn.conf but the Keywords: header is not stored in
the overview, the news administrator is warned and keyword generation
deactivated, since it exists only to populate the overview data.
* Two segfaults in keyword generation were fixed. The first occurred
when an article already had a Keywords: header longer than the
*keylimit* parameter. The second was caused by a possible invalid
pointer beyond the newly allocated Keywords: header.
* Fixed innd handling of empty lines. innd was not properly discarding
an empty command and was closing the connection when it received only
whitespace in a command.
* Fixed a bug in how innd responded to reader commands when readers were
not allowed. A superfluous blank line was sent in its response.
* Fixed a bug in innd's response to TAKETHIS when authentication is
required. Previously, 480 code was returned immediately without
accepting the multi-line data block first, which broke synchronization
in the NNTP protocol.
* Fixed a bug in recognizing the article terminator when empty articles
were fed to innd via IHAVE or TAKETHIS, leading to treating subsequent
NNTP commands as part of the article.
* When innd could not provide information for LIST ACTIVE.TIMES and LIST
NEWSGROUPS, it was returning an invalid error message without a
response code. The proper 503 answer code is now returned.
* When an unauthenticated user tried to post an article, nnrpd replied
440 (posting not allowed) instead of the correct 480 (authentication
required) response if the user might be able to post after
authentication. Thanks to Daniel Weber for the bug report.
* Fixed a bug in both innd and nnrpd answers to LIST commands where the
output was not checked for valid dot stuffing.
* Fixed a bug leading to junked non-control articles being sent to
control-only feeds, and also fixed handling of poisoned control
groups. Thanks to Andrew Gierth for the patch.
* Fixed a bug in innreport leading to incorrect summing of innd stats
when *hostname* was set to an IPv6 address instead of a fully
qualified domain name. Thanks to Petr Novopashenniy for the bug
report.
* Changed how innreport uses innd and innfeed checkpoint messages.
Previously, connections held open for multiple days led to skewed and
incorrect statistics on how many articles had been received or sent.
The count is now more accurate and, for each connection of a feed,
only depends on *incominglogfrequency* in inn.conf and *stats-period*
in innfeed.conf.
* Fixed a bug in nnrpd Perl filter: a header field whose name begins
with the name of a standardized header field was not properly handled.
* Fixed a bug in how innd was parsing Message-ID: and Supersedes:
headers which contained trailing whitespace. The article was
corrupted by an unexpected "\r" in the middle of the header. nnrpd
now checks the syntax of the Message-ID: header field, if present.
* Fixed various bugs in how leading whitespace was treated in headers.
The HDR, XHDR and XPAT commands were not properly showing leading
whitespace in header values. Lone "\n" and "\r" characters are now
changed into spaces and "\r\n" is just removed. archive, makehistory,
and tdx-util now keep leading whitespace in headers when generating
overview data, and archive now changes "\n" (when not preceded by
"\r") into a space when generating overview data.
* Fixed a bug in the generation of overview data which may corrupt
previously generated overview data when a pseudo Xref: header field is
injected in an extra overview field.
* Fixed a bug in the parsing of the *ovgrouppat* wildmat in inn.conf
that prevented overview data from being generated when poisoned groups
were specified but a latter sub-pattern matched the group. A uwildmat
expression is now correctly handled, and a potential segfault has been
fixed. Thanks to Dieter Stussy for the bug report.
* Fixed a bug when HDR, XHDR and XPAT were used when *virtualhost* was
set to true in readers.conf. The Xref: header of articles posted to
only one newsgroup appeared empty.
* Fixed a bug in tdx-util in parsing empty overview fields when called
with -A or -F.
* Fixed a bug in cvtbatch, which was returning only the size of the
headers of an article when the "b" parameter was used with the -w
flag. It now correctly returns the size of the whole article, which
is what "b" was documented to do. cvtbatch also has a new "t"
parameter, which can be used with the -w flag to retrieve the arrival
time of an article.
* Fixed a bug in how mailpost handles cross-posting feature. It was not
properly detaching from sendmail. Thanks to Harald Dunkel for the
patch.
* Fixed a bug in the newsfeeds C flag: the count of followup groups was
one less than the real number. When the value of the Followup-To:
header field is "poster", it is no longer considered to be a followup.
Thanks to Dieter Stussy for the patch.
* When using tradindexed, the overview data for a cancelled article is
now immediately removed from the overview. Thanks to Lars Magne
Ingebrigtsen for the patch.
* batcher has not supported the retrieval of an article with its file
name for a long time. The -S flag has therefore been removed.
* inews no longer rejects articles that contain more than 50 header
fields. Thanks to Torsten Jerzembeck for the bug report.
* news.daily no longer sends superfluous mails when the nomail keyword
is given. Mail is only sent when there is real output. Previously,
there would always be headings and empty lines left over from the
structuring of the full report, which are now omitted. Also, the
output of programs executed with postexec is now included in the
regular mail. Thanks to Florian Schlichting for the patch.
* innconfval no longer maps NULL string or list values to an empty
string or list and instead maps them to undefined values. This fixes
an issue reported by Kamil Jonca: nnrpd was inserting an empty
Organization: header when the *organization* parameter in inn.conf was
unset.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
Changes in 2.5.1
* Fixed a segfault in imap_connection which could occur when SASL was
used.
* Fixed a segfault in the keyword generation code which was assuming
that an article was nul-terminated. Fixed another segfault in the
keyword generation code when an article already contained a Keywords:
header. Thanks to Nix for the bug reports.
* Owing to the US-CERT vulnerability note VU#238019, Cyrus SASL library
has slightly changed. imap_connection and nnrpd now handle that
change. Otherwise, some answers are too long to be properly computed
during SASL exchanges.
* Fixed a memory allocation problem which caused nnrpd to die when
retrieving via HDR/XHDR/XPAT the contents of an extra overview field
absent from the headers of an article. The NEWNEWS command was also
affected on very rare cases. Thanks to Tim Woodall for the bug
report.
* HDR/XHDR/XPAT answers are now robust when the overview database is
inconsistent. When the overview schema was modified without the
overview database being rebuilt, wrong results could be returned for
extra fields (especially a random portion of some other header). The
desired header name is now explicitly searched for in the overview
information.
* Fixed the source which is logged to the news log file for local
postings when the local server is not listed in incoming.conf. A
wrong name was used, taken amongst known peers. The source is now
logged as "localhost".
* Fixed a bug in the timecaf storage method: only the first 65535
articles could be retrievable in a CAF, though everything was properly
stored. (A Crunched Article File contains all the articles that
arrive to the news server during 256 seconds.)
The storage token now uses 4 bytes to store the article sequence
number for timecaf, instead of only 2 bytes. Thanks to Kamil Jonca
for the bug report and also the patch.
* Fixed a bug in both timecaf and timehash which prevented them from
working on systems where short ints were not 16-bit integers.
* When there is not enough space to write an entire CAF header, the
timecaf storage manager now uses a larger blocksize. On 32-bit
systems, the CAF header is about 300 bytes, leaving about 200 bytes
for the free bitmap index (the remaining of a 512-byte blocksize). On
64-bit systems, the size of the CAF header could exceed 512 bytes,
thus leaving no room for the free bitmap index. A 1 KB blocksize is
then used, or a larger size if need be.
* A new CNFS version has been introduced by Miquel van Smoorenburg in
the CNFS header. CNFSv4 uses 4 KB blocks instead of 512 bytes, which
more particularly makes writes faster. CNFSv4 supports
files/partitions up to 16 TB with a 4 KB blocksize.
Existing CNFS buffers are kept unchanged; only new CNFS buffers are
initialized with that new version.
* grephistory -l now returns the contents of the expires history field
as well as the hash of the message-ID. Besides, when the storage API
token does not exist, grephistory -v now also returns the hash of the
requested message-ID.
* The check on cancel messages when *verifycancels* is set to true in
inn.conf has been changed to verify that at least one newsgroup in the
cancel message can be found in the article to be cancelled. This new
feature is from Christopher Biedl.
The previous behaviour was to check whether the cancel message is from
the same person as the original post, which is extremely easy to
spoof; besides, RFC 5537 (USEPRO) mentions that "cancel control
messages are not required to contain From: and Sender: header fields
matching the target message. This requirement only encouraged cancel
issuers to conceal their identity and provided no security".
* The way the "/remember/" line in expire.ctl works has changed.
History retention for an article was done according to its original
arrival time; it is now according to its original posting date.
Otherwise, unnecessary data may be kept too long in the history file.
To achieve that, the HISremember() function in history API now expects
a fourth parameter: the article posting time.
Note that article expiration has not changed and is still based on
arrival time, unless the -p flag is passed to expire or expireover, in
which case posting time is used.
* The default value for "/remember/" has changed from 10 to 11 because
it should be one more than the *artcutoff* parameter in inn.conf, so
that articles posted one day into the future are properly retained in
history.
* auth_krb5 has been rewritten by Russ Allbery to use modern Kerberos
APIs. Note that using ckpasswd with PAM support and a Kerberos PAM
module instead of this authenticator is still recommended.
* A new -L flag has been added by Jonathan Kamens to makehistory so as
to specify a load average limit. If the system load average exceeds
the specified limit, makehistory sleeps until it goes below the limit.
* As UTF-8 is the default character set in RFC 3977, "ctlinnd pause",
"ctlinnd readers", "ctlinnd reject", "ctlinnd reserve", "ctlinnd
throttle" and "nnrpd -r" commands now require the given reason to be
encoded in UTF-8, so that it can be properly sent to news readers.
The creator's name given to "ctlinnd newgroup" is also expected to be
encoded in UTF-8.
* The output of consistency checks for article storage and the history
file no longer appears by default when "cnfsstat -a" is used. A new
-v flag has been added to cnfsstat so as to see it.
* The default path for TLS certificates has changed from *pathnews*/lib
to *pathetc*. It only affects new INN installations or generations of
certificates with "make cert". Besides, a default value has been
added to *tlscapath* because it is required by nnrpd when TLS is used.
* gzip(1) is now the default UUCP batcher in send-uucp instead of
compress(1) because gzip is more widely available than compress, due
to old patent issues. Note that there is no impact on decompression
as it is handled by rnews.
* cnfsheadconf now uses the Perl core module "Math::BigInt" rather than
the deprecated bigint.pl library. When used without specifying a CNFS
buffer, it now properly displays the status of all CNFS buffers.
Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.5
The following changes require your full attention because a manual
intervention may be needed:
* In order to process control messages, controlchan now needs the
"MIME::Parser" module. Packages are available from most
distributions, or you can install the module directly from CPAN
("MIME-tools" in modules/by-module/MIME/, for instance on
ftp.perl.org).
Perl 5.8.0 or later is recommended for INN. If you are using an
earlier version, you will also need the "Encode" module for correct
processing of control messages. (It is included with Perl itself in
5.8.0 and later.)
* Checkgroups control messages are now differently handled by
controlchan: all matching lines in control.ctl will be used for a
given checkgroups and a doit action will really be executed (adding,
removing and changing the status of newsgroups). You should make sure
that your local configuration does not rely on the previous behaviour
of only mailing changes, without actually performing them.
* You should use the new control.ctl.local file shipped with INN in
*pathetc* and, at the same time, update your control.ctl and
moderators files. Also make sure that your active.times, distrib.pats
and newsgroups files are properly encoded in UTF-8, as it is strongly
recommended by RFC 3977.
* The overview.fmt file is no longer used by INN. Two new parameters
have been added to inn.conf: *extraoverviewadvertised* and
*extraoverviewhidden*. Although innupgrade takes care of the change
during "make update", you should make sure that your overview database
is consistent with all the fields declared in overview.fmt because
they will all be advertised, and "Xref:full" forced as the eighth
overview field. See the inn.conf(5) man page for more information
about these parameters.
* The innreport configuration file has slightly changed. The new
innreport.conf file shipped with INN should be used and your possible
changes backported to this new version.
* The $SPOOLBASE variable has been renamed to $SPOOLDIR in innshellvars
in order to be more consistent. It impacts shell scripts only. If
you import innshellvars and use that variable in your scripts, you
will have to rename it.
* gpgverify is no longer included in INN, pgpverify now has better
support for GnuPG and should be used instead.
* The auth_smb authenticator program to check passwords with an SMB
authentication is no longer included in INN. It was a stripped-down
version of pam_smbpass, wasn't maintained, and likely had security
problems. To authenticate to an SMB server such as Samba, use PAM and
ckpasswd's PAM support instead.
The parameters used by nnrpd to provide TLS support are now *tlscafile*,
*tlscapath*, *tlscertfile* and *tlskeyfile* in inn.conf. The sasl.conf
file used for that in previous versions of INN is obsolete. innupgrade
takes care of the change during "make update".
The *nntpactsync* parameter has been renamed to *incominglogfrequency*
in inn.conf; innupgrade handles this renaming during the update.
In newsfeeds, innfeed should be run directly rather than through
startinnfeed. innupgrade will attempt to take care of this modification
during "make update".
When starting innd by hand, innd can just be run directly rather than
using inndstart. If you get error messages about resetting the file
descriptor limits, you may need to increase the file descriptor limits.
See the sample init script in contrib for an example of how to do this.
If you are upgrading from a version prior to INN 2.4, see also
"Upgrading from 2.3 to 2.4".
Changes in 2.5.0
* Ken Murchison has contributed SASL authentication support for nnrpd,
implementing the AUTHINFO SASL section of RFC 4643. If the
--with-sasl option is given to "configure", nnrpd will be able to
authenticate clients via secure SASL mechanisms.
* Julien Elie has implemented in nnrpd the new version of the NNTP
protocol described in RFC 3977, RFC 4642 and RFC 4643. Consequently,
nnrpd now recognizes the CAPABILITIES command, the HDR and LIST
HEADERS commands, the second optional argument to specify a range of
articles to LISTGROUP, the OVER command, as well as the ":bytes" and
":lines" metadata items.
* Heath Kehoe has added the ability to compress overview data before it
is stored in ovdb. It significantly improves the performance of this
storage method and reduces the time spent by expireover. See the new
--with-zlib option to "configure" and the ovdb(5) man page.
* Alexander Bartolich has greatly improved innreport and especially its
XHTML output (a XSL transformation is also provided, if needed, in
innreport-filter.xslt, in the contrib directory).
* inndstart and startinnfeed are no longer part of INN and are no longer
used. Instead, a separate setuid root helper program written by Russ
Allbery is used to bind to the news ports (and does only that), and is
run by innd and nnrpd when necessary. This means that INN may not be
able to increase file descriptor limits for itself the way that it
could before. If you get error messages about resetting the file
descriptor limits, you may need to increase the file descriptor limits
as root before running rc.news as the news user. See the sample init
script in contrib for an example of how to do this. More information
on file descriptor limits can be found in INSTALL.
* INN's IPv6 support was largely rewritten by Russ Allbery. IPv4 and
IPv6 are now handled through the same code wherever possible, the new
IPv6-aware APIs are used everywhere possible, and replacement
functions are provided for systems that don't have them yet. The
network code is now much more centralized, eliminating lots of
duplicate code and adding better IPv6 support to some utilities.
* INN now uses autoconf 2.61 or later for configuration. As a result,
some "configure" options have changed slightly and more of the
standard --*dir options should be supported in lieu of the old
INN-specific options. See "configure --help" for the available
options.
* Thanks to Kirill Berezin, the buffindexed overview method now supports
buffers larger than 2 GB. It is not necessary to compile INN with
large file support to use such large buffers with buffindexed.
Buffindexed is now also more robust with mmaped files and uses more
optimized data placement.
* tinyleaf, a miniature IHAVE-only leaf server written by Russ Allbery,
is now included. See the tinyleaf(8) man page for more information.
* controlchan recognizes the new application/news-groupinfo entity
described in USEPRO and can handle character set conversions of
newsgroup descriptions. The "MIME::Parser" and "Encode" modules are
used. Processing control messages has been greatly improved,
especially checkgroups: the active and newsgroups files are now
properly updated when they are processed, and all matching lines in
control.ctl for a given checkgroups are honoured (which for instance
allows using both drop and doit actions for the same checkgroups
message).
A new control.ctl.local file has also been added in *pathetc*. Rules
set in that file override rules in control.ctl, allowing
administrators to specify local rules for some control messages
without modifying the control.ctl configuration file that comes with
INN. It also specifies encodings to use for the newsgroups file. By
default, UTF-8 will be used for newsgroup descriptions, as strongly
recommended by RFC 3977.
* The Perl and Python *filter_mode* hooks are now called when innd is
shutting down via either "ctlinnd shutdown" or "ctlinnd xexec" with a
new mode value of "shutdown". This will allow the Perl hooks to save
filter data across innd restarts without requiring that the news
administrator throttle the server first. (Python already had a
separate close hook that is also called.)
* The legacy innshellvars.pl script has been replaced with a real INN
Perl module "INN::Config" for Perl programs. The location of Perl
modules can be set with the --with-libperl-dir option to "configure".
All Perl scripts shipped with INN have been converted to use that
module. You may want to consider using "INN::Config" in your Perl
scripts, though innshellvars.pl is still provided with INN.
* Support for embedded Tcl filters in innd has been removed. It hasn't
worked for some time and causes innd crashes if compiled in (even if
not used). If someone wants to step forward and maintain it, we
recommend starting from scratch and emulating the Perl and Python
filters.
* If *strippath* is set in readers.conf, the whole user-supplied Path:
header will now be stripped. Previously, the final component of the
user-supplied Path: would still be retained.
* news2mail can now set the envelope-from address of the mails it sends.
A third optional part in news2mail.cf entries has been added by
D. Stussy to achieve that.
* The -g option to nnrpd is no longer supported. If you are verifying
passwords against the system password database, see the ckpasswd(8)
man page, and in particular the -s option. (A much better idea would
be to just use PAM, which ckpasswd supports.)
* Fixed a bug in "ctlinnd renumber" which was resetting the low and high
water marks of empty newsgroups in the active file. This command now
makes the low water mark one more than the real high water mark. The
answers to LIST ACTIVE, GROUP and LISTGROUP have also been fixed to do
that.
* Support for bzip2-compressed batches (with bunbatch) has been added.
* news.daily now processes innfeed dropped files during daily
maintenance, running procbatch.
* Support for *runasuser* and *runasgroup* parameters in inn.conf allows
setting the news user and the news group under which the news server
runs. Thanks to Ivan Shmakov for this feature.
New other options have been added to configuration files: *ignore* in
incoming.conf, *logstatus*, *nnrpdflags* and *verifygroups* in
inn.conf, and *log-time-format* in innfeed.conf.
The --with-http-dir option has also been added to "configure" to set
*pathhttp* in inn.conf.
The *nntpactsync* parameter has been renamed to *incominglogfrequency*
in inn.conf.
* The sasl.conf file has been removed in favour of new parameters in
inn.conf to deal with TLS support: *tlscafile*, *tlscapath*,
*tlscertfile* and *tlskeyfile*.
* The overview.fmt file has been removed in favour of new parameters in
inn.conf to deal with transition periods to accommodate overview
reconfigurations. It is now possible to specify on the one hand the
fields that should be advertised by nnrpd in response to LIST
OVERVIEW.FMT and used for HDR, XHDR and XPAT requests (see the new
*extraoverviewadvertised* parameter) and on the other hand the
additional fields that should be silently generated (see the new
*extraoverviewhidden* parameter).
* Support for Berkeley DB versions prior to 4.3 has been dropped. You
will have to use at least Berkeley DB 4.4; the recommended version is
4.7.
* INN now builds entirely free of warnings from GCC with fairly
aggressive warning options enabled. This involved lots of cleanup of
const strings, signed versus unsigned type handling, correcting printf
formats, and other changes that fixed obscure bugs and made INN's code
more robust. Russ Allbery has also done considerable cleanup work on
some of INN's internals, simplifying, refactoring, and removing
duplicate code.
* INN's test suite is now much more comprehensive and tests some
high-level functions as well as more of the portability and utility
function layer.
* A lot of work has been done on documentation: improvements of
existing documents, new documentation, and proof-reading. Sample
configuration files are also more detailed.
Changes in 2.4.6
* Fixed the segfault of the radius authenticator when none of the radius
servers respond. Thanks to Matija Nalis for this patch.
* Fixed a lost initialization in buffindexed, which resolves a potential
segfault, thanks to a patch by Kirill Berezin.
* INN now properly supports Perl 5.10.0 (and also 5.8.9); Perl filters
were causing innd to segfault on a few systems like FreeBSD.
* Fixed a long-standing bug which affected Perl hooks for innd: the
variable containing the body of an article was not properly created,
which caused regular expressions matching new lines to fail. It
especially affected filters like Cleanfeed which sometimes failed to
detect unwanted articles.
To fix that issue, Julien Elie added the use of a shared string,
available since Perl 5.7.2, with a fall back to a slower but reliable
copy of such bodies in case the function is not available. Using a
Perl version superior to 5.7.2 is therefore recommended.
* Fixed two bugs which could prevent nnrpd from being run as a daemon in
FreeBSD. Thanks to Johan van Selst for having identified the problem
and to Kai Gallasch for having provided a testing FreeBSD server. The
listening address was not initialized to "::0" or 0.0.0.0 when the -b
flag was not used and an incorrect size was given when IPv6 was
enabled and the binding done using IPv4.
* Some annoying assertion failures occurring in innfeed have been fixed
by Russ Allbery and Julien Elie.
* Fixed a bug in mod-active for aliased newsgroups. Only "=" was
written to the active file. Thanks to D. Stussy for this patch.
* Fixed a bug which caused innd not to honour the Ad flag in newsfeeds.
* Fixed a bug in the IP address displayed for "localhost" in innd's
status file. It was not correctly initialized.
* Fixed a permission issue: XHDR and XPAT were not checking the rights
the user had to read articles when accessing them by their message-ID.
* Fixed a bug in the replies of XHDR, XOVER and XPAT when the newsgroup
is empty. Two initial replies were sent instead of one: the right
420 code followed by a wrong 224 code.
* When no newsgroup is selected, LISTGROUP now returns the right 412
code (instead of 481).
* inncheck now uses a range of permissions to see whether the file modes
are correctly set. Therefore, different configurations depending on
the security the user wants to enforce on his system are possible.
* A new improved version of docheckgroups is shipped with INN. The -u
flag permits updating automatically the newsgroups file (with a proper
number of tabulations and an alphabetical sort), removing obsolete
descriptions and adding new ones. A second argument on command-line
permits specifying which newsgroups should not be checked, so as not
to treat them.
* An *email=* keyword has been added by James Ralston to news.daily in
order to supply another mail address than the one set at configure
time for Usenet daily reports.
* An updated moderators file with information about the aioe.*, perl.*
and si.* hierarchies is provided; control.ctl is also up to date.
* INN supports Berkeley DB 4.7, which is the recommended version to use
owing to various bugs affecting previous versions of Berkeley DB.
* Other minor bugs have also been fixed.
Changes in 2.4.5
* Fixed the "alarm signal" around "SSL_read" in nnrpd: it allows a
proper disconnection of news clients which were previously hanging
when posting an article through a SSL connection. Moreover, the
*clienttimeout* parameter now works on SSL connections. Thanks to
Matija Nalis for the patch.
* SO_KEEPALIVE is now implemented for SSL TCP connections on systems
which support it, allowing system detection and closing the dead TCP
SSL connections automatically after system-specified time. Thanks to
Matija Nalis for the patch.
* Fixed a segmentation fault when an article of a size greater than
remaining stack is retrieved via SSL. Thanks to Chris Caputo for this
patch.
* Fixed a few segfaults and bugs which affected both Python innd and
nnrpd hooks. They no longer check the existence of methods not used
by the hooked script. An issue with Python exception handling was
also fixed, as well as a segfault fixed by Russ Allbery which happened
whenever one closes and then reopens Python in the same process.
Julien Elie also fixed a bug when reloading Python filters (they were
not always correctly reloaded) and a segfault when generating access
groups with embedded Python filters for nnrpd. Many thanks to David
Hlacik for its bug reports.
* The nnrpd.py stub file in order to test Python nnrpd hooks, as
mentioned in their documentation, is now installed; only INN.py was
previously installed in *pathfilter*. Also fixed a bug in INN.py and
add missing methods to it.
* Fixed a long-standing bug in innreport which prevented it from
correctly reporting nnrpd and innfeed log messages.
* Fixed a hang in Perl hooks on (at least) HP/PA since Perl 5.10.
* Fixed a compilation problem on some platforms because of AF_INET6
which was not inside a HAVE_INET6 block in innfeed.
* Fixed a bug in innfeed which contained thrice the same IPs for each
peer; it unnecessarily slowed the peer IP rotation for innfeed.
Thanks, D. Stussy, for having seen that. Miquel van Smoorenburg
provided the patch.
* A new *heavily* improved version of pullnews is shipped with this INN
release. This new version is provided by Geraint Edwards. He added
no more than 16 flags, fixed some bugs and integrated the backupfeed
contrib script by Kai Henningsen, adding again 6 other flags. A
long-standing but very minor bug in the -g option was especially fixed
and items from the to-do list implemented. Many thanks again to
Geraint Edwards.
* New headers are accessible through Perl and Python innd filtering
hooks. You will find the exact list in the INN Python Filtering and
Authentication Hooks documentation (doc/hook-python) and in Python
samples. Thanks to Matija Nalis for this addition of new useful
headers.
* New samples for Python nnrpd hooks are shipped with INN:
nnrpd_access.py for access control and nnrpd_dynamic.py for dynamic
access control. The nnrpd_auth.py script is now only used for
authorization control. See the readers.conf man page for more
information (especially the *python_auth*, *python_access* and
*python_dynamic* parameters). The documention about INN Python
Filtering and Authentication Hooks has also been improved by Julien
Elie.
Changes in 2.4.4
* Fixed incomplete checking of packet sizes in the ctlinnd interface in
the no-Unix-domain-sockets case. This is a potential buffer overflow
in dead code since basically all systems INN builds on support Unix
domain sockets these days. Also track the buffer size more correctly
in the client side of this interface for the Unix domain socket case.
* Group blocks in incoming.conf are now correctly parsed and no longer
cause segfaults when loading this file.
* Fixed a problem with innfeed continuously segfaulting on amd64
hardware (and possibly on lots of 64-bit platforms). Many thanks to
Ollivier Robert for his patch and also to Kai Gallasch for having
reported the problem and provided the FreeBSD server to debug it.
* scanlogs now rotates innfeed's log file, which prevents innfeed from
silently dying when its log file reaches 2 GB.
* Perl 5.10 support has been added to INN thanks to Jakub Bogusz.
* Some news clients hang when posting an article through a SSL
connection: it seems that nnrpd's SSL routines make it wrongly wait
for data completion. In order to fix the problem, the select() wait
is now just bypassed. However, the IDLE timer stat is currently not
collected for such connections. Thanks to Kachun Lee for this
workaround.
* Fixed a bug in the display of the used compressor ("cunbatch" was used
if arguments were passed to gzip or bzip2).
* Fixed a bug in mailpost and pullnews which prevented useful error
messages to be seen. Also add the -x flag to pullnews in order to
insert Xref: headers in articles which lack one.
* If compiling with Berkeley DB, use its ndbm compatibility layer for
ckpasswd in preference to searching for a traditional dbm library.
INN also supports Berkeley DB 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6 thanks to Marco d'Itri.
* ovdb_init now properly closes stdin/out/err when it becomes a daemon.
The issue was reported by Viktor Pilpenok and fixed by Marco d'Itri.
* Added support for Diablo quickhash and hashfeed algorithms. It allows
distributing the messages among several peers (new Q flag for
newsfeeds). Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this implementation
in INN.
* innd now listen on separate sockets for IPv4 and IPv6 connections if
the IPV6_V6ONLY socket option is available. There might also be
operating systems that still have separate IPv4 and IPv6 TCP
implementations, and advanced features like TCP SACK might not be
available on v6 sockets. Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this
patch.
* The two configuration options *bindaddress* and *bindaddress6* can now
be set on a per-peer basis for innfeed. Setting *bindaddress6* to
"none" tells innfeed to never attempt an IPv6 connection to that host.
Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this patch.
* Added a *nnrpdflags* parameter to inn.conf (modelled on the concept of
*innflags*) to permit passing of command line arguments to instances
of nnrpd spawned from innd.
* A new inn.conf parameter called *pathcluster* has been added: it
allows appending a common name to the Path: header on all incoming
articles. *pathhost* and *pathalias* (if set) are still appended to
the path as usual, but *pathcluster* is always appended as the last
element (e.g. on the leftmost side of the Path: header). Thanks to
Miquel van Smoorenburg for this feature.
* simpleftp has been rewritten to use "Net::FTP". Indeed, ftp.pl is no
longer shipped with Perl 5 and the script did not work.
* perl-nocem will now check for a timeout and re-open the socket if
required. Additionally, perl-nocem will switch to cancel_ctlinnd in
case cancel_nntp fails after sending the Message-ID. Thanks to
Christoph Biedl for the patch. A more detailed documentation has also
been written for perl-nocem(8).
* The RADIUS configuration is now wrapped in a "server {}" block in
radius.conf.
* Checkgroups when there is nothing to change no longer result in
sending a blank mail to administrators. Besides, no mail is sent by
controlchan for the creation of a newsgroup when the action is "no
change".
* Checkgroups are now properly propagated even though the news server
does not carry the groups they are posted to.
* controlchan and docheckgroups now handle wire format messages so that
articles from the spool can be directly fed to them.
* Newgroup control messages for existing groups now change their
description. If a mail is sent to administrators, it reminds them to
update their newsgroups file. It also warns when there are missing or
obsolete descriptions. Furthermore, the newsgroups file is now
written prettier (from one to three tabulations between the name of
the group and its short description) and to.* groups cannot be
created.
* The sample control.ctl file has been extensively updated.
* Fixed empty LISTGROUP replies which were not terminated. Thanks to
David Canzi for the patch.
* In response to a LIST [file] command, if the file does not exist, we
assume it is not maintained and return 503 instead of 215 and an empty
file. Moreover, capability to LIST ACTIVE.TIMES for a wildmat pattern
as its third argument has been added in order to select wanted
newsgroups.
* inews now tries to authenticate if it does not receive a 200 return
code after MODE READER. Indeed, it might be able to post even with a
201 return code and also with another codes like 440 or 480.
* If creating a new history file, set the ownership and mode
appropriately. inncheck also expects fewer things to be private to
the news user. Most of the configuration files will never contain
private information like passwords.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
Changes in 2.4.3
* Previous versions of INN had an optimization for handling XHDR
Newsgroups that used the Xref: header from overview. While this does
make the command much faster, it doesn't produce accurate results and
breaks the NNTP protocol, so this optimization has been removed.
* Fixed a bug in innd that allowed it to accept articles with duplicated
headers if the header occurred an odd number of times. Modified the
programs for rebuilding overview to use the last Xref: header if there
are multiple ones to avoid problems with spools that contain such
invalid articles.
* Fixed yet another problem with verifying that a user has permissions
to approve posts to a moderated group. Thanks, Jens Schlegel.
* Increase the send and receive buffer on the Unix domain socket used by
ctlinnd. This should allow longer replies (particularly for innstat)
on platforms with very low default Unix domain socket buffer sizes.
* rnews's handling of articles with nul characters, NNTP errors, header
problems, and deferrals has been significantly improved.
* Thomas Parmelan added support to send-uucp for specifying the funnel
or exploder site to flush for feeds managed through one and fixed a
problem with picking up old stranded work files.
* Many other more minor bug fixes, optimization improvements, and
documentation fixes.
Changes in 2.4.2
* INN is now licensed under a less restrictive license (about as
minimally restrictive as possible shy of public domain), and the
clause similar to the old BSD advertising clause has been dropped.
* "make install" and "make update" now always install the newly built
binaries, rather than only installing them if the modification times
are newer. This is the behavior that people expect. "make install"
now also automatically builds a new (empty) history database if one
doesn't already exist.
* The embedded Tcl filter code has been disabled (and will be removed
entirely in the next major release of INN). It hasn't worked for some
time and causes innd crashes if compiled in (even if not used). If
someone wants to step forward and maintain it, I recommend starting
from scratch and emulating the Perl and Python filters.
* ctlinnd should now successfully handle messages from INN up to the
maximum allowable packet size in the protocol, fixing problems sites
with many active peers were having with innstat output.
* Overview generation has been fixed in both makehistory and innd to
follow the rules in the latest NNTP draft rather than just replacing
special characters with spaces. This means that the unfolding of
folded header lines will not introduce additional, incorrect
whitespace in the overview data.
* nnrpd now uniformly responds with a 480 or 502 status code to attempts
to read a newsgroup to which the user does not have access, depending
on whether the user has authenticated. Previously, it returned a 411
status code, claiming the group didn't exist, which confuses the
reactive authentication capability of news readers.
* If a user is not authorized to approve articles (using the "A"
*access* control in readers.conf), articles that include Approved:
headers will be rejected even if posted to unmoderated groups. Some
other site may consider that group to be moderated.
* The configuration parser used for readers.conf and others now
correctly handles "#" inside quoted strings and is more robust against
unmatched double quotes.
* Messages mailed to moderators had two spaces after the colons in the
headers, rather than one. This bug has been fixed.
* A bug that could cause heap corruption and random crashes in innd if
INN were compiled with Python support has been fixed.
* Some problems with innd's tracking of article size and enforcement of
the configured maximum article size have been fixed.
* pgpverify will now correctly verify signatures generated by GnuPG and
better supports GnuPG as the PGP implementation.
* INN's code should now be more 64-bit clean in its handling of size_t,
pointer differences, and casting of pointers, correcting problems that
showed up on 64-bit platforms like AMD64.
* Improved the error reporting in the history database code, in inews,
in controlchan, and in expire.
* Many other, more minor bugs have also been fixed.
Changes in 2.4.1
* SECURITY: Handle the special filing of control messages into per-type
newsgroups more robustly. This closes a potentially exploitable
buffer overflow. Thanks to Dan Riley for his excellent bug report.
* Fixed article handling in innd so that articles without a Path: header
(arising from peers sending malformatted articles or injecting
malformatted articles through rnews) would not cause innd to crash.
(This was not exploitable.)
* Fixed a serious bug in XPAT handling, thanks to Tommy van Leeuwen.
* "configure" now looks for sendmail only in /usr/sbin and /usr/lib, not
on the user's path. This should reduce the need for --with-sendmail
if your preferred sendmail is in a standard location.
* The robustness of the tradindexed overview method has been further
increased, handling more edge cases arising from corrupted databases
and oddly-named newsgroups.
* innd now never decreases the high water mark of a newsgroup when
renumbering, which should help ameliorate overview and active file
synchronization problems.
* Do not close and reopen the history file on ctlinnd reload when the
server is paused or throttled. This was breaking ctlinnd reload all
during a server pause.
* Various minor portability and compilation issues fixed. Substantial
numbers of compiler warnings have been cleaned up, thanks largely to
work by Ilya Kovalenko.
* Multiple other more minor bugs have been fixed.
* Documentation and man pages have been clarified and updated.
Upgrading from 2.3 to 2.4
The inn.conf parser has changed between INN 2.3 and 2.4. Due to that
change, options in inn.conf that contain whitespace or a few other
special characters must be quoted with double quotes, and empty
parameters (parameters with no value) are not allowed. INN 2.4 comes
with a script, innupgrade, run automatically during "make update", that
will attempt to fix any problems that it finds with your inn.conf file,
saving the original as inn.conf.OLD.
This change is the beginning of standardization of parsing and syntax
across all of INN's configuration files.
The history subsystem now has a standard API that allows other backends
to be used. Because of this, you now need to specify the history method
in inn.conf. Adding:
hismethod: hisv6
will tell INN to use the same history backend as was used in previous
versions. innupgrade should take care of this for you.
ovdb is known to have some locking and timing issues related to how
nnrpd shuts down (or fails to shut down) the overview databases. If you
have stability problems with ovdb, try setting *readserver* to true in
ovdb.conf. This will funnel all ovdb reads through a single process
with a cleaner interface to the underlying Berkeley DB database.
If you use Perl authentication for nnrpd (if *nnrpdperlauth* in inn.conf
is true), there have been major changes. See "Changes to Perl
Authentication Support for nnrpd" in doc/hook-perl for details.
Similarly, if you use Python authentication for nnrpd (if
*nnrpdpythonauth* in inn.conf is true), there have been major changes.
See "Changes to Python Authentication and Access Control Support for
nnrpd" in doc/hook-python for details.
If you use send-uucp, it has been completely rewritten and now takes a
configuration file to specify its behavior. See its man page for more
information. If you use sendbatch, it is no longer included in INN
since the new send-uucp can handle all of the same functionality.
The wildmat API has been renamed (to uwildmat and friends; see
uwildmat(3) for the interfaces) to distinguish it from Rich $alz's
original version, since it now supports UTF-8. This may require changes
in other software packages that link against INN's libraries.
If you are upgrading from a version prior to INN 2.3, see "Upgrading
from 2.2 to 2.3".
Changes in 2.4.0
* IPv6 support has been added, disabled by default. If you have IPv6
connectivity, build with --enable-ipv6 to try it. There are no known
bugs, but please report any problems you find (or even successes, if
you use an unusual platform). There are a few changes of interest;
further information is available in doc/IPv6-info.
* The tradindexed overview method has been completely rewritten and
should be considerably more robust in the face of system crashes. A
new utility, tdx-util, is provided to examine the contents of the
overview database, repair inconsistencies, and rebuild the overview
for particular groups from a tradspool news spool. See tdx-util(8)
for more details.
* The Perl and Python authentication hooks for readers have been
extensively overhauled and integrated better with readers.conf. See
the Changes sections in doc/hook-perl and doc/hook-python for more
details.
* nnrpd now optionally supports article injection via IHAVE, see
readers.conf(5). Any articles injected this way must have Date, From,
Message-ID, Newsgroups, Path, and Subject headers. X-Trace and
X-Complaints-To headers will be added if the appropriate options are
set in readers.conf, but other headers will not be modified/inserted
(e.g. NNTP-Posting-Host, NNTP-Posting-Date, Organization, Lines, Cc,
Bcc, and To headers).
* nnrpd now handles arbitrarily long lines in POST and IHAVE;
administrators who want to limit the length of lines in locally posted
articles will need to add this to their local filters instead.
* nnrpd no longer handles the poorly-specified RFC 977 optional fourth
argument to the NEWGROUPS command specifying the "distributions" that
the command was supposed to apply to.
Clients that use that argument will break. There are not believed to
be any such clients, and it's easy enough to just filter the returned
list of newsgroups (which is generally fairly short) to achieve the
same results.
* nnrpd no longer accepts UTC as a synonym for GMT for NEWGROUPS or
NEWNEWS. This usage was never portable, and was rejected by the NNTP
working group. It is being removed now in the hope that it will be
caught before anyone starts to rely on it.
* innfeed supports a new peer parameter, *backlog-feed-first*, that if
set to true feeds any backlog to a peer before new articles, see
innfeed.conf(5). When used in combination with *max-connections* set
to 1, this can be used to enforce in-order delivery of messages to a
peer that is doing Xref slaving, avoiding cases where a
higher-numbered message is received before a lower-numbered message in
the same group.
* Several other, more minor protocol issues have been fixed:
connections rejected due to the connection rate limiting in innd
receive 400 replies instead of 504 or 505, and ARTICLE without an
argument will always either retrieve the current article or return a
423 error, never advance the current article number to the next valid
article.
See doc/compliance-nntp for all of the known issues with INN's
compliance with the current NNTP draft.
* All accesses to the history file for all parts of INN now go through a
generic API like the storage and overview subsystems do. This will
eventually allow new history implementations to be dropped in without
affecting the rest of INN, and will significantly improve the
encapsulation of the history subsystem. See the libinnhist(3) man
page for the details of the interface.
* INN now uses a new parser for the inn.conf file. This means that
parameters containing whitespace or other special characters must now
be quoted; see inn.conf(5). It fixes the long-standing bug that
certain values must be included in inn.conf even if using the defaults
for the use of shell or Perl scripts, and it will serve as the basis
for standardizing and cleaning up the configuration file parsing in
other parts of INN. innupgrade is run during "make update" and should
convert an existing inn.conf file for you.
* send-uucp has been replaced by a completely rewritten version from
Marco d'Itri, Edvard Tuinder, and Miquel van Smoorenburg, which uses a
configuration file that specifies batch sizes, compression methods,
and hours during which batches should be generated. The old sendbatch
script has been retired, since send-uucp can now handle everything
that it did.
* Two "configure" options have changed names: --with-tmp-path is now
--with-tmp-dir, and --with-largefiles is now --enable-largefiles, to
improve consistency and better match the "autoconf" option guidelines.
* Variables can now be used in the newsfeeds file to make it easier to
specify many similar feeds or feed patterns. See the newsfeeds(5) man
page for details.
* Local connections to INN support a new special mode, MODE CANCEL, that
allows efficient batch cancellation of messages. This is intended to
be the preferred interface for external spam and abuse filters like
NoCeM. See "CANCEL FEEDS" in innd(8) for details.
* Two new options, *nfsreader* and *nfswriter*, have been added to
inn.conf to aid in building NFS based shared reader/writer platforms.
On the writer server configure *nfswriter* to true and on all of the
readers configure *nfsreader* to true; these options add calls to
force data out to the NFS server and force it to be read directly from
the NFS server at the appropriate moments. Note that it has only been
tested on Solaris 8, using CNFS as the storage mechanism and
tradindexed as the overview method.
* A new option, *tradindexedmmap*, has been added to inn.conf. If set
to true (the default), then the tradindexed overview method will use
mmap() to access its overview data (in 2.3 you couldn't control this;
it always used mmap).
* Thanks to code contributed by CMU, innfeed can now feed an IMAP server
as well as other NNTP servers. See the man page for innfeed(8) for
more information.
* An authenticator, auth_smb, that checks a username and password
against a remote Samba server is now included. See auth_smb(8) for
details.
* The wildmat functions in INN now support UTF-8, in a way that should
allow them to still work with most simple 8-bit character sets in
widespread use. As part of this change, some additional wildmat
interfaces are now available and the names have changed (to uwildmat,
where "u" is for Unicode). See uwildmat(3) for the details.
* The interface between external authenticators and nnrpd is now
properly documented, in doc/external-auth. A library implementing
this interface in C is provided, which should make it easier to write
additional authenticators resolvers. See libauth(3) for details, and
any of the existing programs in authprogs/ for examples.
* INN now checks to ensure that the configured temporary directory is
not world-writeable. Additionally, most (if not all) of the temporary
file creation in INN now uses functions that create temporary files
properly and safely.
* All of the applicable bug fixes from the INN 2.3 STABLE series are
also included in INN 2.4.
Changes in 2.3.5
* Clients using POST are no longer permitted to provide an
Injector-Info: header.
* Fixed a bug causing posts with Followup-To: set to a moderated group
to be rejected if the posting user didn't have permission to approve
postings.
* Fixed bugs in inncheck with setuid rnews or setgid inews, in
innconfval with inn.conf parameters containing shell metacharacters
but no spaces, and in parsedate.y with some versions of yacc. Fixed a
variety of size-related printf format warnings (e.g., %d vs. %ld)
thanks to the work of Winfried Szukalski.
Changes in 2.3.4
* LIST ACTIVE no longer returns data when given a single group argument
if the client is not authorized to read that group.
* XHDR and XPAT weren't correctly parsing article headers, resulting in
searches for the header "newsgroup" matching the header "newsgroups".
* Made CNFS more robust against crashes by actually syncing the cycbuff
headers to disk as was originally intended. Fixed a memory leak in
the tradspool code.
* Two bugs in pgpverify when using GnuPG were fixed: it now correctly
checks for gpgv (rather than pgp) when told to use GnuPG and expects
the keyring to be pubring.gpg (not pubring.pgp).
* Substantial updates to the sample provided control.ctl file.
* Compilation fixes with Perl 5.8.0, Berkeley DB 4.x, current versions
of Linux (including with large file support), and Tru64. inndf fixes
for ReiserFS.
* Various bugs in the header handling in nnrpd have been fixed,
including hangs when using virtual domains and improper processing of
folded headers under certain circumstances.
* Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
Changes in 2.3.3
* pgpverify now supports using GnuPG to check signatures (rather than
PGP) without the pgpgpg wrapper. GnuPG can check both old-style RSA
signatures and new OpenPGP signatures and is recommended over PGP 2.6.
If you have GnuPG installed, pgpverify will use it rather than PGP,
which means that you may have to create a new key ring for GnuPG to
use to verify signatures if you were previously using PGP.
* Users can no longer post articles containing Approved: headers to
moderated groups by default; they must be specifically given that
permission with the *access* parameter in readers.conf. See the man
page for more details.
* Two bugs in repacking overview index files and a reliability bug with
writing overview data were all fixed in the tradindexed overview
method, hopefully making it somewhat more reliable, particularly for
makehistory.
* If rc.news.local exists in the INN binary directory, it will be run
with the start or stop argument whenever rc.news is run. This is
available as a hook for local startup and shutdown code.
* The default history table hash sizes were increased because a
too-small value can cause serious performance problems (whereas a
too-large hash just wastes a bit of disk space).
* The sample control.ctl file has been extensively updated.
* Wildmat exclusions ("@" and "!") should now work properly in
storage.conf newsgroup patterns.
* The implementation of the -w flag for expireover was fixed;
previously, the value given to -w to change expireover's notion of the
current time was scaled by too much.
* Various other more minor bug fixes, standards compliance fixes, and
documentation improvements.
Changes in 2.3.2
* innxmit can again handle regular filenames as input as well as storage
API tokens (allowing it to be used to import an old traditional
spool).
* Several problems with tagged-hash history files have been fixed thanks
to the debugging efforts of Andrew Gierth and Sang-yong Suh.
* A very long-standing (since INN 1.0!) NNTP protocol bug in nnrpd was
fixed. The response to an ARTICLE command retrieving a message by
Message-ID should have the Message-ID as the third word of the
response, not the fourth. Fixing this is reported to *possibly* cause
problems with some Netscape browsers, but other news servers correctly
follow the protocol.
* Some serious performance problems with expiration of tradspool should
now be at least somewhat alleviated. tradspool and timehash now know
how to output file names for removal rather than tokens, and fastrm's
ability to remove regular files has been restored. This should bring
expiration times for tradspool back to within a factor of two of
pre-storage-API expiration times.
* Added a sample subscriptions file and documentation for it and
innmail.
* Various other bug fixes and documentation updates.
Changes in 2.3.1
* inews no longer downloads the active file, no longer tries to send
postings to moderated groups to the moderator directly, and in general
duplicates less of the functionality of nnrpd, instead letting nnrpd
handle it. This fixes the problem of inews not working properly for
users other than news without being setgid.
* Added a man page for ckpasswd.
* A serious bug in the embedded Perl authentication hooks was fixed,
thanks to Jan Rychter.
* The annoying compilation problem with embedded Perl filtering on Linux
systems without libgdbm installed should be fixed.
* INN now complains loudly at configure time if the configured path for
temporary files is world-writeable, since this configuration can be a
security hole.
* Many other varied bug fixes and documentation fixes of all sorts.
Upgrading from 2.2 to 2.3
There may be additional things to watch out for not listed here; if you
run across any, please let <inn-bugs@isc.org> know about them.
Simply doing a "make update" is not sufficient to upgrade; the history
and overview information will also have to be regenerated, since the
formats of both files have changed between 2.2 and 2.3. Regardless of
whether you were using the storage API or traditional spool under 2.2,
you'll need to rebuild your overview and history files. You will also
need to add a storage.conf file, if you weren't using the storage API
under INN 2.2. A good default storage.conf file for 2.2 users would be:
method tradspool {
newsgroups: *
class: 0
}
Create this storage.conf file before rebuilding history or overview.
If you want to allow readers, or if you want to expire based on
newsgroup name, you need to tell INN to generate overview data and pick
an overview method by setting *ovmethod* in inn.conf. See INSTALL and
inn.conf(5) for more details.
The code that generates the dbz index files has been split into a
separate program, makedbz. makehistory still generates the base history
file and the overview information, but some of its options have been
changed. To rebuild the history and overview files, use something like:
makehistory -b -f history.n -O -T /usr/local/news/tmp -l 600000
(change the /usr/local/news/tmp path to some directory that has plenty
of temporary space, and leave off -O if you're running a transit-only
server and don't intend to expire based on group name, and therefore
don't need overview.) Or if your overview is buffindexed, use:
makehistory -b -f history.n -O -F
Both will generate a new history file as history.n and rebuild overview
at the same time. If you want to preserve a record of expired
Message-IDs in the history file, run:
awk 'NF==2 { print; }' < history >> history.n
to append them to the new history file you created above. Look over the
new history file and make sure it looks right, then generate the new
index files and move them into place:
makedbz -s `wc -l < history.n` -f history.n
mv history.n history
mv history.n.dir history.dir
mv history.n.hash history.hash
mv history.n.index history.index
(Rather than .hash and .index files, you may have a .pag file if you're
using tagged hash.)
For reader machines, nnrp.access has been replaced by readers.conf.
There currently isn't a program to convert between the old format and
the new format (if you'd like to contribute one, it would be welcomed
gratefully). The new file is unfortunately considerably more complex as
a result of its new capabilities; please carefully read the example
readers.conf provided and the man page when setting up your initial
configuration. The provided commented-out examples cover the most
common installation (IP-based authentication for all machines on the
local network).
INN makes extensive use of mmap(2) for the new overview mechanisms, so
at the present time NFS-mounting the spool and overview on multiple
reader machines from one central server probably isn't feasible in this
version. mmap tends to interact poorly with NFS (at the least, NFS
clients won't see updates to the mapped files in situations where they
should). (The preferred way to fix this would, rather than backing out
the use of mmap or making it optional, to add support for Diablo-style
header feeds and pull-on-demand of articles from a master server.)
The flags for overchan have changed, plus you probably don't want to run
overchan at all any more. Letting innd write overview data itself
results in somewhat slower performance, but is more reliable and has a
better failure mode under high loads. Writing overview data directly is
the default, so in a normal upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 you'll want to
comment out or remove your overchan entry in newsfeeds and set
*useoverchan* to false in inn.conf.
crosspost is no longer installed, and no longer works (even with
traditional spool). If you have an entry for crosspost in newsfeeds,
remove it.
If you're importing a traditional spool from a pre-storage API INN
server, it's strongly recommended that you use NNTP to feed the articles
to your new server rather than trying to build overview and history
directly from the old spool. It's more reliable and ensures that
everything gets put into the right place. The easiest way to do this is
to generate, on your old server, a list of all of your existing article
files and then feed that list to innxmit. Further details can be found
in the FAQ at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html>.
If you are using a version of Cleanfeed that still has a line in it
like:
$lines = $hdr{'__BODY__'} =~ tr/\n/\n/;
you will need to change this line to:
$lines = $hdr{'__LINES__'};
to work with INN 2.3 or later. This is due to an internal optimization
of the interface to embedded filters that's new in INN 2.3.
Changes in 2.3.0
* New readers.conf file (replaces nnrp.access) which allows more
flexible specification of access restrictions. Included in the sample
implementations is a RADIUS-based authenticator.
* Unified overview has been replaced with an overview API, and there are
now three separate overview implementations to choose from. One
(tradindexed) is very like traditional overview but uses an additional
index file. The second (buffindexed) uses large buffers rather than
separate files for each group and can handle a higher incoming article
rate while still being fast for readers. The third (ovdb) uses
Berkeley DB to store overview information (so you need to have
Berkeley DB installed to use it). The *ovmethod* key in inn.conf
chooses the overview method to use.
Note that ovdb has not been as widely tested as the other overview
mechanisms and should be considered experimental.
* All article storage and retrieval is now done via the storage API.
Traditional spool is now available as a storage type under the storage
API. (Note that the current traditional spool implementation causes
nightly expire to be extremely slow for a large number of articles, so
it's not recommended that you use the tradspool storage method for the
majority of a large spool.)
* The timecaf storage method has been added, similar to timehash but
storing multiple articles in a single file. See INSTALL for details
on it.
* INN now supports embedded Python filters as well as Perl and Tcl
filters, and supports Python authentication hooks.
* There is preliminary support for news reading over SSL, using OpenSSL.
* To simplify anti-abuse filtering, and to be more compliant with news
standards and proposed standards, INN now treats as control messages
only articles containing a Control: header. A Subject: line beginning
with "cmsg " is no longer sufficient for a message to be considered a
control message, and the Also-Control: header is no longer supported.
* The INN build system no longer uses subst. (This will be transparent
to most users; it's an improvement and modernization of how INN is
configured.)
* The build and installation system has been substantially overhauled.
"make update" now updates scripts as well as binaries and
documentation, there is better support for parallel builds ("make
-j"), there is less "make" recursion, and far more of the
system-dependent configuration is handled directly by "autoconf".
libtool build support (including shared library support) should be
better than previous releases.
* All of the applicable bug fixes from the INN 2.2 STABLE series are
also included in INN 2.3.
Changes in 2.2.3
* INN no longer installs inews setgid news or rnews setuid root by
default. If you need the old behavior, --enable-uucp-rnews and/or
--enable-setgid-inews must be given to "configure". See INSTALL for
more information.
* A security hole when *verifycancels* is turned on in inn.conf (not the
default) was fixed.
* Message-IDs are now limited to 250 octets to prevent interoperability
problems with other servers.
* Various other security paranoia fixes have been made.
* Embedded Perl filters fixed to work with Perl 5.6.0.
* Lots of bug fixes.
Changes in 2.2.2
* Various minor bug fixes and a Y2K bug fix. The Y2K bug is in version
version 2.2.1 only and will show up after Jan 1st, 2000 when a news
reader issues a NEWNEWS command for a date prior to the year 2000.
Changes in 2.2.1
* Various bug fixes, mostly notably fixes for potential buffer overflow
security vulnerabilities.
Changes in 2.2.0
* New storage.conf file (replaces storage.ctl).
* New (optional) way of handling non-cancel control messages
(controlchan) that serializes them and prevents server overload from
control message storms.
* Support for actsyncd to fetch active file with ftp; configured by
default to use <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/active.Z> if you
run actsyncd. Be sure to read the manual page for actsync to
configure an actsync.ign file for your site, and test simpleftp if you
do not "configure" with wget or ncftp. Also see
<https://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/README>.
* Some options to "configure" are now moved to inn.conf
(*merge-to-groups* and *pgp-verify*, without the hyphen).
* inndf, a portable version of df(1), is supplied.
* New cnfsstat program to show stats of CNFS buffers.
* news2mail and mailpost programs for gatewaying news to mail and mail
to news are supplied.
* pullnews program for doing a sucking feed is provided (not meant for
large feeds).
* The innshellvars.csh.in script is obsolete (and lives in the obsolete
directory, for now).
$Id: news.pod 10326 2019-02-04 14:22:34Z iulius $
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