Re: setting up a news server

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Sun, May 23, 1999 at 04:50:33PM -0500, Matt Garman wrote:
> I want to set up a NNTP server for reading Usenet news offline.  I
> was reading in the ISP-Hookup-HOWTO about some possible solutions,
> CNews+NewsX or CNews+suck or Leafnode...  I see Debian has these all
> packaged.
>
> My question is: which setup is typically the easiest to setup and get
> running?  I don't need anything too fancy except the ability to read
> from more than one server (e.g. my ISP's news server and my school's
> news server).  Also, my school's server needs to be sent a login and
> password before I can access it.

other answers seem to have missed the main point of your question, so
i'll have a go :)

leafnode is what you want. it can use more than one news server, and it
supports login/password access to them. it fetches new articles in all
groups you're interested(*) in and stores them in a local news cache
(under /var/spool/news).

it's very simple to set up - just install the package, and edit the
config file in /etc/news/leafnode.


BTW, CNews is basically obsolete these days. if you want a real
news-server (as opposed to a caching news server like leafnode) then
inn is a much better choice. however, both inn and cnews are quite
complicated pieces of software and take a lot of work to keep them
running smoothly. this is especially true if this is your first time as
a news admin and you haven't yet written a swag of scripts to deal with
all the little quirks of news.

leafnode doesn't require any maintainence. it just works.  IMO, it is
pretty much ideal for the scenario you describe.



(*) "interest" level is based on whether you are actively reading a
newsgroup or not. if you always want to fetch a newsgroup regardless of
how often you read it, then just set up a cron job which runs at least
once/day and does something like:

	touch /var/spool/news/interesting.groups/news.group.name

here's my /usr/local/sbin/touch-leafnode script to do that:

---cut here---
#! /bin/sh

newsdir=/var/spool/news
interesting=$newsdir/always.interesting

umask 002

cd $newsdir/interesting.groups

cat $interesting | xargs touch
---cut here---

i also added the following line to /etc/cron.d/leafnode:

---cut here---
0 0 * * * news  /usr/local/sbin/touch-leafnode
---cut here---


to mark a newsgroup as "always interesting", i just add it to the file
/var/spool/news/always.interesting. leafnode still fetches it even when
i don't read any news for a few days or a few weeks.

craig

--
craig sanders