$Revision: 1.1.1.1 $ InterNetNews -- the Internet meets Netnews ------------------------------------------ "Remember to tell your kids about the days when USENET was store and forward." -- Jim Thompson, as part of a message that said he was getting under 200ms propagation, disk to disk. InterNetNews is a complete Usenet system. The cornerstone of the package is innd, an NNTP server that multiplexes all I/O. Think of it as an nntpd merged with the B News inews, or as a C News relaynews that reads multiple NNTP streams. Newsreading is handled by a separate server, nnrpd, that is spawned for each client. Both innd and nnrpd have some slight variances from the NNTP protocol; see the manpages. The distribution is a compressed tar file. Create a directory, cd into it, and unpack the tar file in that directory. For example: ; mkdir inn ; cd inn ; ftp ftp.uu.net ftp> user anonymous ftp> type image ftp> get news/nntp/inn/inn.tar.Z inn.tar.Z ftp> quit ; uncompress Install.ms You should probably print out a copy of config/config.dist when you print out the installation manual. Please read the COPYRIGHT. This package has NO WARRANTY; use at your own risk. When updating from a previous release, you will usually want to do "make update" from the top-level directory; this will only install the programs. To update your scripts and config files, cd into the "site" directory and do "make clean" -- this will remove any files that are unchanged from the official release. Then do "make diff >diff"; this will show you what changes you will have to merge in. Now merge in your changes (from where the files are, ie. /usr/lib/news...) into the files in $INN/site. (You may find that due to the bug fixes and new features in this release, you may not need to change any of the scripts, just the configuration files). Finally, doing "make install" will install everything. If you have a previous release you will probably also want to update the pathnames, etc., in the new config file from your old config. Here is one way to do that: % cd config % make subst % cp config.dist config.data % ./subst -f {OLDFILE} config.data where "{OLDFILE}" names your old config.data file. Configuration is done using subst. Subst is in config/subst.sh and doc/subst.1. The history file is written using DBZ. The DBZ sources and manual page are in the dbz directory. Unlike subst, DBZ is kept separately, to make it easier to track the C News release. The subst script and DBZ data utilities are currently at the "Performance Release" patch date. Thanks to Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer for permission to use and redistribute subst, and to Jon Zeef for permission to use DBZ as modified by Henry. This version includes support for Geoff Collyer's news overview package, known as nov. Nov replaces the external databases used by nn, trn, etc., with a common text database. INN support includes programs to build and maintain the overview database, and an XOVER command added to nnrpd (the news-reading daemon) that is becoming a common extension to fetch the overview data from an NNTP connection. Nnrpd uses the overview database internally, if it exists, making certain commands (e.g., XHDR) much faster. The nov package includes a newsreader library that you will need, and some utilities that you will not; it is available on world.std.com in the file src/news/nov.dist.tar.Z. Prototypes of modified newsreaders are in the in src/news/READER.dist.tar.Z -- most maintainers will be providing official support very soon. To make it explicit: if you already have a newsreader that can use the overview database, either via my NNTP xover command, or by reading directly from NFS, then INN has all you need. I hope you find INN useful. If you like it, send me a postcard. Rich $alz Open Software Foundation 11 Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 INN mail: Other mail: