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Welcome to INN 2.2.2!
This work is sponsored by the Internet Software Consortium.
Please see the INSTALL document for installation instructions.
See the NEWS file for what's changed from the previous release.
What is INN?
INN (InterNetNews), originally written by Rich Salz, is an extremely
flexible and configurable Usenet / netnews news server. For a
complete description of the protocols behind Usenet and netnews, see
RFC 1036 and RFC 977 (or their replacements). In brief, netnews is a
set of protocols for exchanging messages between a decentralized
network of news servers. News articles are organized into newsgroups,
which are themselves organized into hierarchies. Each individual news
server stores locally all articles it has received for a given
newsgroup, making access to stored articles extremely fast. Netnews
does not require any central server; instead, each news server passes
along articles it receives to all of the news servers it peers with,
those servers pass the articles along to their peers, and so on,
resulting in "flood fill" propagation of news articles.
A news server performs three basic functions: It accepts articles
from other servers and stores them on disk, sends articles it has
received out to other servers, and offers stored news articles to
readers on demand. It additionally has to perform some periodic
maintenance tasks, such as deleting older articles to make room for
new ones.
Originally, a news server would just store all of the news articles it
had received in a file system. Users could then read news by reading
the article files on disk (or more commonly using news reading
software that did this efficiently). These days, news servers are
almost always stand-alone systems and news reading is supported via
network connections. A user who wants to read a newsgroup opens that
newsgroup in their newsreader software, which opens a network
connection to the news server and sends requests for articles and
related information. The protocol that a newsreader uses to talk to a
news server and that a news server uses to talk to another news server
over TCP/IP is called NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol).
INN supports accepting articles via either NNTP connections or via
UUCP. innd, the heart of INN, handles NNTP feeding connections
directly; UUCP newsfeeds use rnews (included in INN) to hand articles
off to innd. Other parts of INN handle feeding articles out to other
news servers, most commonly innfeed (for real-time outgoing feeds) or
nntpsend and innxmit (used to send batches of news created by innd to
a remote site via TCP/IP). INN can also handle outgoing UUCP feeds.
The part of INN that handles connections from newsreaders is nnrpd.
Also included in INN are a wide variety of supporting programs to
handle periodic maintenance and recovery from crashes, process special
control messages, maintain the list of active newsgroups, and generate
and record a staggering variety of statistics and summary information
on the usage and performance of the server.
INN also supports an extremely powerful filtering system that allows
the server administrator to reject unwanted articles (such as spam and
other abuses of Usenet).
INN is free software, supported by the Internet Software Consortium
and volunteers around the world. See the section on Supporting the
INN Effort below.
Prerequisites
Compiling INN requires an ANSI C compiler (gcc is recommended). INN
was originally written in K&R C, but supporting pre-ANSI compilers has
become enough of a headache that a lot of the newer parts of INN will
no longer compile with a non-ANSI compiler. gcc itself will compile
with most vendor non-ANSI compilers, however, so if you're stuck with
one, installing gcc is highly recommended. Not only will it let you
build INN, it will make installing lots of other software much easier.
You may also need GNU make (particularly if your system make is
BSD-derived), although most SysV make programs should work fine.
INN uses GNU autoconf to probe the capabilities of your system, and
therefore should compile on nearly any Unix system. See INSTALL for a
list of systems it is known to work on. If you encounter problems
compiling or running INN, or if you successfully run INN on a platform
that isn't listed in INSTALL, please let us know (see Reporting Bugs
below).
Perl, at least Perl 4, is required to build INN. Perl 5.004 is
required if you want the embedded Perl filter support (which is highly
recommended; some excellent spam filters have been written for INN).
Since all versions of Perl previous to 5.004 are buggy (including
security problems) and have fewer features, installing Perl 5.004 or
later is recommended.
If you want to enable PGP verification of control messages (highly
recommended), you will need to have PGP installed. See INSTALL for
more details.
Getting Started
A news server can be a fairly complicated piece of software to set up
just because of the wide variety of pieces that have to be configured
(who is authorized to read from the server, what newsgroups it
carries, and how the articles are stored on disk at a bare minimum,
and if the server isn't completely stand-alone -- and very few servers
are -- both incoming and outgoing feeds have to be set up and tested).
Be prepared to take some time to understand what's going on and how
all the pieces fit together. If you have any specific suggestions for
documentation, or comments about things that are unclear, please send
them to the INN maintainers (see Reporting Bugs below).
See the INSTALL file for step-by-step instructions for setting up and
configuring a news server.
INN also comes with a very complete set of man pages; there is a man
page for every configuration file and program that comes with INN.
(If you find one that doesn't have a man page, that's a bug. Please
do report it to inn-bugs@isc.org.) When trying to figure out some
specific problem, reading the man pages for all of the configuration
files involved is a very good start.
Some good resources on the web (as of December 1999) are:
http://www.isc.org
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Elena.Samsonova/unix/INN/v2.3/
http://www.blank.org/innfaq
http://www.mibsoftware.com/userkt/userkt.html
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~barr/INN.html
http://members.home.net/rck/software/inn.html
http://www.cybercable.fr/~droyer/inn.html
Reporting Bugs
We're interested in all bug reports. Not just on the programs, but on
the documentation too. Please send *all* such reports to:
inn-bugs@isc.org
even if you post to usenet, please CC the above address. All other
INN mail should go to:
inn@isc.org
(please do *not* send bug reports to this address)
For general "how do I do this" questions you should post to
news.software.nntp as there are a lot of experienced INN users there,
and there isn't the time necessary to answer general questions.
Mailing Lists
There are various mailing lists you can join or send messages to if you
like. Some of them you must be a member of before you can send mail to
them (thank the Spam gods for that policy), and one of them is
read-only (no postings allowed).
inn-workers@isc.org discussion of INN development (postings by
members only)
inn-patches@isc.org where to send patches for consideration for
inclusion into the pool. (open)
inn-committers@isc.org CVS commit messages get sent to this list
(postings not allowed)
inn-bugs@isc.org Where to send bugs reports (open). If
you're an INN expert we encourage you
to join this to answer questions.
inn-announce@isc.org Where announcements for INN get sent
(postings not allowed).
To join these lists, send a subscription request to the '-request'
address. I.e.:
inn-workers-request@isc.org
inn-patches-request@isc.org
inn-committers-request@isc.org
inn-bugs-request@isc.org
inn-announce-request@isc.org
Contributing Code
If you have a patch that you'd like to be considered for inclusion into
the pool, then please mail it to inn-patches@isc.org
Have fun!
Who's Responsible / Who to Thank
See the CONTRIBUTORS file for a long list of past contributors as
well as people from the inn-workers mailing list who have dedicated
a lot of time and effort to getting this new version together. They
deserve a big round of applause. They've certainly got our thanks.
Last, but certainly not least, Rich Salz, the original author of INN
deserves a lion's share of the credit for writing INN in the first
place and making it the most popular news server software on the
planet (no NNTP yet to the moon, but we plan to be there first).
Supporting the INN Effort
Note that INN is supported by the Internet Software Consortium,
and although it is free for use and redistribution and incorporation
into vendor products and export and anything else you can think of,
it costs money to produce. That money comes from ISP's, hardware and
software vendors, companies who make extensive use of the software,
and generally kind hearted folk such as yourself.
The Internet Software Consortium has also commissioned a DHCP
server implementation, handles the official support/release of BIND,
and supports the Kerberos Version 5 effort at MIT. You can learn
more about the ISC's goals and accomplishments from the web page at
<URL:http://www.isc.org/isc/>.
James Brister
inn-bugs@isc.org -- bug reports.
inn@isc.org -- general INN related mail
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