As long as PPP is active, it will be
possible to read news online. There are lots
of available programs, two simple alternatives being
rtin and
trn.
To start reading news, the only thing required in terms of
configuration in most cases is to set NNTPSERVER
(usually once and for all in the file
.profile):
export NNTPSERVER=news.acme.xz
To get the From-address correct in postings, some
programs may require:
To be able to read news while
offline and thus reduce phone bills and give greater
flexibility, one must set up a local news-spool of one
sort or the other. This requires some configuration, and there
will also be a certain amount of disk space involved. After
initial setup, things should run more or less by themselves, with
only some attention needed from time to time.
The solution described here is based on the news-server
C News and the NNTP protocol.
C News was originally targeted towards another sort of
configuration, but is flexible enough to handle our situation
too. One might also use the more recent INN
news server but it might require a bit more in terms
of resources. Either way, be careful not to install
both; they don't live together easily.
It is crucial that all maintenance of news is done while logged
in as user news, and that all configuration
files is placed in
/usr/lib/news. One way of handling this is, while
logged in as root to write su news;
cd.
The most important files in the configuration are:
active is an overview
over active newsgroups. It is updated as required by the command
addgroup, e.g. addgroup
comp.os.linux.networking y.
organization should
simply contain whatever you want in the Organization:
header field, in our case:
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
mailname should in our
case be set to acme.xz.
whoami is set to the name
of your site in the Path: thread.
In a setup as described here, using
newsx, this name will never leave the machine, so
you can set this to whatever you like as long as you are pretty
sure it is unique. In this case roderick.
The file
sys controls
fetching and further distribution of news. We will assume the
ISP in our case adds acme.xz to the Path, and that this
is the only news source we have. The example given really tells
that we will accept everything that arrives, and that we will
only post news to acme.xz that it hasn't seen before,
and is originally posted at our own site. In this simplified
setup we assume that the all groups will come from a single
source. /all specifies the distribution, and
must be included. The letter F says
that (pointers to) outgoing news articles will be collected in a
file.
ME:all/all::
acme/acme.xz:all,!junk/all:FL:
A subdirectory for the outgoing news must be created, in
our case:
mkdir /var/spool/news/out.going/acme
mailpaths controls
posting in moderated groups, although this task may usually be
left to the ISP.
C News needs a certain degree of daily maintenance, but this can
be specified once and for all via the command crontab -e
issued as user news. A suggested
setup follows; it can be tuned as required:
# maintain incoming and outgoing batches
10,40 * * * * /usr/lib/newsbin/input/newsrun
# expire C News, once a day
30 0 * * * /usr/lib/newsbin/expire/doexpire
# monitor and report if needed
00 2 * * sat /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/addmissing
40 3 * * * /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/newswatch
50 3 * * * /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/newsdaily
newsrun moves articles in and
out (twice every hour),
doexpire will delete articles as they get old (every
night at 00:30), and the three last commands does various
supervisory and error correcting tasks.
One should also ensure that things are cleaned up when starting
the machine. As user root, add the following line to
/etc/rc.d/rc.local:
su news -c /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/newsboot
News may be collected via the program NewsX,
picking news from an NNTP-server
The program can be found at:
Setting up NewsX is quite simple.
Installation is a classic case of:
make
su
make install
exit
With the setup outlined here, all you have to do is to create the
groups you want to read using the
addgroup command.
To fetch articles, user news issues the
following commands (assuming communication via PPP or similar is
up):
newsrun
newsx acme news.acme.xz
newsrun
The option -d gives continuous printout to the screen.
Refer to the NewsX documentation for further information.
NewsX will also take care of posting of outgoing news.
To control disposal of articles as they get old, a file
explist is required. The comments in this
example should explain what we want to do:
# hold onto history lines 14 days, nobody gets >120 days
/expired/ x 14 -
/bounds/ x 0-1-120 -
# retain these for 2 months
comp.sources,comp.os.linux.all x 60 -
# noise gets thrown away fast
junk,control x 2 -
# default: 14 days, no archive
all x 14 -
ALT: In a small news-spool, one will usually not need
the newsgroup control. The traffic is huge
compared to the possible usefulness. The main point is that
articles will be canceled, and that groups may be created
automatically. To ensure that control messages containing
newgroup not shall mess up things for us, a file called
newgroupperm specifies
what we will allow:
comp.os.linux tale@uunet.com yv
all any nq
In this example, all proper groups under comp.os.linux will be
created (y), and the user news will be notified (v).
Everything else will be silently (q) ignored (n). The last line
is sufficient if you want to create all groups manually.
A different solution altogether is to install the integrated
package
leafnode. This will
handle all tasks required for a personal news spool, and is easy
to configure. It is available via:
Return to user news by writing exit. In
/usr/lib/leafnode/config change the line that
defines the NNTP server. In our case:
server = news.acme.xz
Leafnode will look after itself by adding the following command
via crontab -e as user news:
# expire Leafnode, once a day
0 4 * * * /usr/local/sbin/texpire
News exchange is also done as user news by the following
command (assuming PPP is up and running):
/usr/local/sbin/fetch
Users who wants to read news should then use the recipe in
How do I set up an online news-reader?, except that they
configure for the local machine, i.e:
export NNTPSERVER=localhost
That should be all there is to it. The first
fetch will transfer a list of available
newsgroups. Leafnode will then monitor what groups the users are
requesting, and adapt to this the next time it is
activated.
Note that leafnode does not seems to work in cases where NNTP
authorization is required. +.LP
ALT: An alternative to leafnode is
nntpcache, available from:
ftp://ftp.suburbia.net/pub/nntpcache/nntpcache.tgzALT: Another alternative is to use the newsreader
slrn together with the
slrn-pull package. The newsreader must
be compiled with the spool feature set.