On Wed, Sep 29, 1999 at 06:19:19PM -0500, Charles Lewis wrote:
> What are all the components I need in order to setup a news server so that I
> can connect from a remote computer. I currently have the nntp and cnews
> packages installed, although don't know what else to do to configure them or
This depends on what you want to do. Do you want to provide a news
server to a large number of people or are you only interested in reading
news? In the former case you want to set up a large news server
package, but in the latter case you can get away with a much simpler
program like Leafnode. If you're on a dialup connection you're almost
certainly in the latter group.
The standard full news server these days is INN - cnews/nntp is an older
system. I haven't used it in a while, but from what I remember the
documentation supplied is pretty complete. It can be a bit tricky to
find everything you need, but all the information is in there. When
using this sort of system you normally agree with several other systems
that you will send each other news, and your servers push the news at
each other whenever they get new news.
As well as INN and cnews there's also Diablo and some commercial packages,
but Diablo isn't packaged for Debian and the commercial packages are
commercial and often not for Linux. Diablo does have a nice reputation
for configurability, though.
> setup newsgroups. Do I also need suck? I can't seem to find any FAQ or HOWTO
You need suck if you're not running a full news server but want to use
INN or nntp/cnews. It (or an equivalent package such as newsx) talks to
another news server like a client, downloads news and then feeds it into
your own news server and also does the reverse translation.
OTOH, it is very much easier to use Leafnode. This will do all the work
of inn and suck that is needed to support a small userbase, but doesn't
scale very well to large numbers of users and groups.
> on this topic. Also, where would I get my newsfeed from?
> Charles Lewis, Director of Administrative Computing
> Southwestern Adventist University, Keene, TX
Does your university LAN have a news server on it already? If you're on
the LAN and there is one you probably don't want to use a server at all
but to simply point your client at it. If there is no server then one
or more of your IP providers (redundancy is good) will probably provide
a feed. They should be able give you quite a bit of help with setting up.
Otherwise, places like news.software.nntp are good places to look.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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