Welcome to INN 2.0!

  Please read this document thoroughly before trying to install INN. You'll be
  glad you did.

  If you are upgrading from a previous release of INN (pre-2.0) then it is
  recommended that you make copies of your old configuration files and use them
  as guides for doing a clean installation and configuration of 2.0. Many
  config files have changed, some have been added, and some have been removed.
  You'll find it much easier to start with a fresh install than to try to
  update your old installation.

Supported Systems

  < Should list all supported OS/hardware configurations >

  FreeBSD 2.2.x
  Linux 2.0.x (with libc 5.4 or libc 6.0)
  OpenBSD ?.?
  SCO 5.0.4 (tested with gcc 2.8.1)
  Solaris 2.5.x
  Solaris 2.6.x
  SunOS 4.1.4
  UX/4800 R11 and up

Before You Begin  <A note here about required packages>

  + INN requires perl 5.004 or greater to run.  If you don't have perl, INN
    will fail to build.  For instructions on obtaining and installing perl, see
    http://language.perl.com/info/software.html.

  + If you want to enable support for authenticated control messages (this is
    NOT required) then you will need to install PGP.  There are some questions
    involving PGP's license if you are running a commercial installation of
    INN (i.e. you are an ISP).  See http://www.pgp.com for more information
    about PGP.

    <I'm completely confused by the PGP site now.  Someone more familiar with
     it needs to update this entry.  I always did a make install in FreeBSD
     ports dirs :)>

Unpacking the Distribution

  Obtain the INN source distribution from ftp.isc.org in directory
  /isc/inn/snapshots.  The files in the snapshots directory are snapshots of
  the current inn source taken daily.  They are stored in date format, i.e.
  0400 5 May 1998 GMT's file is named inn-1998-05-17_04-00.tar.gz.  Choose the
  newest file.  The distribution is in gzip compressed tar archive format.  To
  extract it, execute:

     gunzip -c <inn-src-file> | tar -xf -

  Extracting the source distribution will create a directory named inn where
  the source resides.

Choosing an Article Storage Format

  INN supports three methods of storing articles on your system. Each method
  has specific advantages and disadvantages. These storage methods are:

  traditional - This is the storage method used by all previous versions of INN.
                Articles are stored as individual text files whose names are the
                same as the article number. The articles are divided up into
                directories based on the news group name. For example, article
                12345 in news.software.nntp would be stored in the article spool
                under the path "news/software/nntp/12345".

                   Advantages: solid time-tested code, compatible with all of
                               the third-party INN add-ons available, gives you
                               fine control over article retention times.

                Disadvantages: takes a fast computer with a fast I/O system
                               to keep up with current USENET traffic volumes
                               due to file system overhead. Groups with heavy
                               traffic tend to create a bottleneck because of
                               inefficiencies in storing large numbers of
                               article files in a single directory.
                              
    timehash  - Articles are stored as files like in the traditional storage
                method, but are divided up into directories based on the
                arrival time so so that no directory contains enough files to
                cause a bottleneck.

                   Advantages: Heavy traffic groups do not cause bottlenecks,
                               fine control of article retention time still
                               possible.

                Disadvantages: Still suffers from speed degradation due to
                               filesystem overhead.

    cnfs      - CNFS stores articles sequentially in pre-configured buffer
                files.  When the end of the buffer is reached articles new
                articles are stored from the beginning of the buffer,
                overwriting older articles.
 
                   Advantages: Blazingly fast because no file creations or
                               deletions are necessary to store an article.
                               Does not require manual article expiration; old
                               articles are deleted to make room for new ones
                               when the buffers get too full. Also, with CNFS
                               your server will never throttle itself due to a
                               full spool disk, and you can restrict groups to
                               just certain buffer files so that they can never
                               use more than the amount of disk space you
                               allocate to them.

                Disadvantages: Article retention times are more difficult to
                               control because old articles are overwritten
                               automatically.

  In general, if you plan to carry a full news feed and want to actually have
  your server keep up with the traffic you should be using CNFS. If you just
  want to carry a subset of the full newsgroup hierarchy (such as everything
  but the binaries group) then we suggest the traditional storage method.

Installing INN

  Before beginning installation you should make sure that there is a user
  on your system named 'news', and that this user's primary group is set to
  a group called 'news'. The home directory of this user should be set to
  the directory under which you wish to install INN ("/usr/local/news" is the
  default and is a good choice).  INN will install itself as this user and
  group. You can change these if you want but these are the defaults and it's
  easier to stick with them on a new installation.

  INN 2.0 uses the GNU 'configure' program to make configuration rather
  painless.  Unless you have a rather abnormal setup configure should be able
  to completely configure INN for your setup. If you want to change the
  defaults you can invoke the configure script with one or more command line
  options. The most commonly used options are described below.

  Note for SCO 5.0.4... configure insists that syslog doesn't work for SCO
  and so sets the following as missing: syslog.3 syslog.c syslog.o in the 
  config/config.data file. You need to manually delete those entries before
  trying to make the distribution.

  --prefix=PATH           Sets the installation prefix for INN. The default
                          is /usr/local/news. All of INN's programs and support
                          files will be installed under this directory. You
                          should set this to the home directory of your "news"
                          user (it will make installation and maintenance
                          easier). Defaults to "/usr/local/news".

  --enable-tagged-hash    Use tagged hash table for the history database.
                          The tagged hash format uses much less memory but is
                          somewhat slower. This option is recommended if you
                          have less than 256 MB of RAM on your news server.

  --enable-pgp-verify     This enable support for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)
                          signature checking on control messages. This makes
                          it nearly impossible for malicious individuals to
                          post forged newsgroup creation or deletion messages
                          for the major hierarchies (comp.*, rec.*, etc.)
                          You will need to have PGP installed on your system
                          for this to work, and there are issues with using
                          PGP on commercial systems, so this option is off by
                          default.

  --with-perl             Enables support for Perl, allowing you to install
                          filter scripts written in Perl. Highly recommended,
                          because many of the really good spam filters are
                          written in Perl. You will need Perl 5.004 or later
                          installed on your system to enable this option.

  --with-tcl              Enables support for TCL (Tool Command Language). This
                          allows you to install filter scripts written in TCL.
                          Most available filters seem to be written in Perl
                          these days, so you can safely leave out TCL support.
                          If you choose to enable this then you will need to
                          have a suitable TCL distribution installed.

  --disable-shared        Do not create shared libraries

  --disable-static        Do not create static libraries

  A suggested set of options, provided you have the necessary software
  installed, is "./configure --with-perl --enable-pgp-verify".

  If the configure program runs successfully, then you are ready to build the
  distribution. From the root of the INN source tree, type:

        make

  Again, please note that for SCO 5.0.4, you need to edit the 
  config/config.data file to delete the references to syslog.3 syslog.c and 
  syslog.o before running the make command.

  At this point you can step away from the computer for a little while and have
  a quick snack while INN compiles.  On a decently fast system it should only
  take five or ten minutes at the most to build.

  Once the build has completed successfully, you are ready to install INN into
  its final home. Type:

        make install

  This will install INN under the install directory (/usr/local/news, unless
  you specified something else to the configure script.) You are now ready for
  the really fun part: configuring your copy of INN!

Configuring INN

  From this point on we will assume that you have set up the news user on your
  system as suggested in the Installation section above so that the root of the
  INN installation on your system is accessible as "~news/".

  All of INN's configuration files are located in the ~news/etc directory. 
  Unless noted otherwise, any files referred to below are in this directory.

  Before we begin, it is worth mentioning the wildmat pattern matching syntax
  used in many configuration files. These are simple wildcard matches using
  the asterisk ("*") as the wildcard character, much like the simple wildcard
  expansion used by Unix shells (but unlike Unix shells, you cannot do full
  regular expressions; only the asterisk is supported).

  In many cases, wildmat patterns can be specified in a comma-separated list
  to indicate a list of newsgroups.  When used in this fashion, each pattern
  is checked in turn to see if it matches, and the last pattern in the line
  that matches the group name is used. Patterns beginning with "!" mean to
  exclude groups matching that pattern. For example:

        *, !comp.*, comp.os.*

  In this case, we're saying we match everything ("*"), except that we don't
  match anything under comp ("!comp.*"), unless it is actually under the
  comp.os hierarchy ("comp.os.*"). This is because non-comp groups will
  match only the first pattern (so we want them), comp.os groups will match
  all three patterns (so we want them too, because the third pattern counts
  in this case), and all other comp groups will match the first and second
  patterns and will be excluded by the second pattern.

  In most INN configuration files, lines beginning with a pound sign are
  considered comments and are ignored. Any deviations from this practice
  will be noted in the description for that particular file.
  
  1. inn.conf (REQUIRED)

  The first, and most important file is inn.conf. This file is organized as
  a series of parameter-value pairs, one per line.  The parameter is first,
  followed by a colon and one or more whitespace characters and the value
  itself. For some parameters the value is a string or a number; for others
  it is "yes" or "no."

  The inn.conf file contains dozens of changeable parameters, but only a few
  really need to be edited during normal operation:

  organization         Set to the name of your organization as you want it to
                       appear in the Organization: header of all local posts.
                       This will be overridden by the value of the ORGANIZATION
                       environment variable (if it exists). If neither this
                       parameter nor the environment variable or set then no
                       Organization: header will be added.

  pathhost             This is the name of your news server as you wish it to
                       appear in the Path header of all postings which travel
                       through your server (this includes local posts and
                       incoming posts that you forward out to other sites).
                       If no pathhost is specified then the FQDN of the
                       machine will be used instead.

  domainname           Sets the domain name for your server. Normally this
                       is determined automatically by INN, but in some cases
                       it is necessary to set it manually. For example, if you
                       are running NIS on a SunOS system -and- your hostnames
                       are not fully-qualified (ie, your systems are named
                       xxxx instead of xxxx.domain.com) then you will need to
                       use this option to set your domain name manually. If in
                       doubt, leave this option commented out or remove it
                       completely.

  complaints           If present this address is used to add an
                       X-Complaints-To: header to all local posts. The usual
                       value would be something like "abuse@your.domain" or
                       "postmaster@your.domain". If not specified then the
                       newsmaster email address will be used.

  allownewnews         If set to "yes" then INN will support the NEWNEWS
                       command for news readers. This will really kill your
                       server performance and it is strongly suggested that
                       you set this to "no".

  status
  timer                Determines how often status and timer updates are
                       written to the log files. The value is specified in
                       seconds with a value of 0 disabling logging. The
                       suggested value is 300 seconds (5 minutes.)

  storageapi           Set to "yes" if articles should be stored using the
                       Storage Manager API. You must set this to "no" if you
                       are using the traditional article storage method or
                       "yes" if you are using timehash or cnfs.  See the 
                       section "Choosing an Article Storage Format" for more
                       information.

  extendeddbz          This is only used if you did not configure INN for
                       tagged hash and you are using the storage API. If set
                       to "yes", then overview offset information for articles
                       is stored in the DBZ history hash file as well as in the
                       history text file. This will make the hash file three
                       times larger, but should increase performance for news
                       readers when they retrieve article overview information.
                       If you don't mind using 200-300 MB of extra space for
                       your history database then you should set this to "yes".

  nntpdoverstats       If set to "yes" then nnrpd will log statistics about
                       how much time was spent during the various stages of
                       reading article overview information. Not terribly
                       useful unless you are trying to track down news reader
                       performance problems.

  hiscachesize         The size in kilobytes to use for caching recently used
                       history file entries. Setting this to 0 disables history
                       caching. History caching can greatly increase the
                       number of articles per second that your server is
                       capable of processing.  A value of 16384 (16 MB) is a
                       good choice if you can spare the RAM.

  overviewmmap         Overview data is mmaped and reading overview would be
                       faster with this.  Note that on some systems (NextStep
                       and IRIX-6.5 are reported so far) it would be worse than
                       ever.  For those systems overviewmmap should be "no".

  2. newsfeeds (REQUIRED)

  The newsfeeds file determines how incoming articles are redistributed to
  your peers and to other INN processes. The newsfeeds file is very
  versatile and contains dozens of options; we will touch on just the
  basics here. The newsfeeds(5) man page contains more detailed
  information.

  The newsfeeds file is organized as a series of feed entries. Each feed
  entry is composed of four fields separated by colons. Entries may span
  multiple lines by using the backslash (\) to indicate that the next line
  is a continuation of the current line.

  The first field in an entry is the name of the feed. It must be unique,
  and for feeds to other news servers it is usually set to the actual
  hostname of the remote server (this makes things easier). The name can
  optionally be followed by a slash and an exclude list. If the feed name
  or any of the names in the exclude list appear in the Path line of an
  article, then that article will not be forwarded to the feed as it is
  assumed that it has passed through that site once already. The exclude list
  is useful when a news server's hostname is not the same as what it puts in
  the Path header of its articles, or when you don't want a feed to receive
  articles from a certain source.

  The second field specifies a set of desired newsgroups and distribution
  lists, given as newsgroup-pattern/distribution-list. The distribution list
  is not described here; see the newsfeeds(5) man page for information. The
  newsgroup pattern is a wildmat-style pattern list as described above, with
  one minor addition: patterns beginning with "@" will cause any articles
  posted to groups matching that pattern to be dropped, even if they match
  patterns for groups that ARE wanted. Otherwise, articles that match both
  "want" and "don't want" patterns are sent.

  The third field is a comma-separated list of flags that determine both the
  type of feed entry and sets certain parameters for the entry. See the
  newsfeeds(5) man page for information on the flag settings.

  The fourth field is a multi-purpose parameter. Its usage depends on the
  settings of the flags in the third field. Again, see the man pages for
  more information.

  Now that you have a rough idea of the file layout, we'll begin to add the
  actual feed entries.  First we'll set up the special ME entry. This entry is
  required and serves two purposes. First, the newsgroup pattern specified
  for this entry is prepended to the newsgroup list of all other feeds; second,
  the ME entry's distribution pattern determines what distributions are
  accepted from remote sites by your server. The default ME entry in the
  newsfeeds file probably won't suit your tastes; a good starting point would
  be a subscription pattern of "*,!junk,!local*" and a distribution list of
  "!local". This will mean that by default all sites will receive all groups
  except the junk group and groups in the local.* hierarchy, and that you will
  receive any distributions except those marked as "local" (any such articles
  are probably being leaked out by a misconfigured server).

  Next we'll set up special entries for the overchan, innfeed and (if you're
  not using cnfs or timehash) crosspost programs. There are already entries
  for these programs in the default newsfeeds file; you need only uncomment
  them and edit the pathnames to the programs to match your setup (there are
  two entries for overchan, one for use with the Storage Manager API and one
  for use without it; uncomment only the one matching your setup) . Assuming
  you installed INN under the default path of /usr/local/news then the
  appropriate feed entries would look like this:

  For traditional storage method:

        overview!:*:Tc,WO:/usr/local/news/bin/overchan

        crosspost:*:Tc,Ap,WR:/usr/local/news/bin/crosspost

        innfeed!:\
                !*\
                :Tc,Wnm*,S16384:/usr/local/news/bin/startinnfeed -y

  For cnfs or timehash storage method:

        overview!:*:Tc,Ao,WhR:/usr/local/news/bin/overchan

        innfeed!:\
                !*\
                :Tc,Wnm*,S16384:/usr/local/news/bin/startinnfeed -y

  Finally, you need to add entries for any actual sites to which you will
  be feeding articles. They will all have the same general format:

        my-feed-site.domain.com/exclude-list\
                :newsgroup-list\
                :Tm:innfeed!

  Set the feed name to the name of the remote site, and if the site uses a
  name other than its host name for Path headers then put that in the
  exclude-list (if your exclude list is empty, leave out the "/" after the
  site name as well). The newsgroup list can be left empty if the default
  newsgroup pattern from your ME entry is sufficient; otherwise, set the
  newsgroup pattern appropriately. The last line should not be modified.

  3. incoming.conf (REQUIRED)

  The incoming.conf file describes what machines are allowed to connect to
  your host to feed articles. In previous versions of INN a different
  file (hosts.nntp) was used to do some of what incoming.conf can do. See
  the incoming.conf manpage for more details.

  4. cycbuff.conf (Required only if using the CNFS article storage method)

  CNFS stores articles in logical objects called "metacycbuffs." Each of the
  metacycbuffs is in turn composed of one or more physical buffers called
  "cycbuffs." As articles are written to the metacycbuff each article is
  written to the next cycbuff in the list in a round-robin fashion. This is
  so that you can distribute the individual cycbuffs across multiple physical
  disks and balance the load between them.

  There are two ways to create your cycbuffs:

      1. Use a raw disk partition (best). This will give you the most speed,
         but it required that your OS support mmap()'ing a block device.
         Solaris supports this, FreeBSD and Linux do not. Also on many PC-
         based Unixes it is difficult to create more than eight partitions,
         which severely limits your options.

      2. Use a real file on a filesystem. This will be a bit slower than using
         a raw disk partition, but it should work on any Unix system.

  If you're having doubts, use option #2.

  Now you need to decide on the sizes of your cycbuffs and metacycbuffs. You'll
  probably want to separate the heavy-traffic groups (alt.binaries.* and maybe
  even the rest of alt.*) into their own metacycbuff so that they don't
  overrun the server and push out articles on the more useful groups. If you
  have any local groups that you want to stay around for a while then you
  should put them in their own metacycbuff as well.
   
  For each metacycbuff, you now need to determine how many cycbuffs will
  make up the metacycbuff, the size of those cycbuffs and where they will
  be stored. Some OSs do not support files larger than 2 GB which will force
  all of your cycbuffs to be < 2GB (even if they are stored on raw disk
  partitions). Linux is known to have this limitation, FreeBSD does not. If in
  doubt, keep your cycbuffs smaller than 2 GB. Also when laying out your
  cycbuffs you will want to try to arrange them across as many physical disks
  as possible (or use a striped disk array and put them all on that).

  For each cycbuff you will be creating, add a line to the cycbuff.conf file
  like the following:

        cycbuff:BUFFNAME:/path/to/buffer:SIZE

  BUFFNAME must be unique and must be < 8 characters in length. Something
  simple like "BUFF00", "BUFF01", etc. is a decent choice. SIZE is the buffer
  size in kilobytes (1000000 KB is approximately one GB, so if you are
  trying to stay under 2 GB then cap your sizes at 2000000).

  Now, you need to tell INN how to group your cycbuffs into metacycbuffs.
  This is similar to creating cycbuff entries:

        metacycbuff:BUFFNAME:CYCBUFF,CYCBUFF,CYCBUFF

  BUFFNAME is the name of the metacycbuff, and like cycbuff names must be
  unique and <= 8 characters long. These should be a bit more meaningful than
  the cycbuff names since they will be used in other config files as well.
  Try to name them after what will be stored in them; for example if this
  metacycbuff will hold alt.binaries postings, then "BINARIES" would be a good
  choice. Finally, the last part of the name is a comma-separated list of all
  of the cycbuffs that should be used to build this metacycbuff. Each cycbuff
  should only appear in -one- metacycbuff line.

  5. storage.ctl (Required only if using the CNFS or timehash storage methods)

  The storage.ctl file maps newsgroups into storage classes, which determine
  where and how the article is stored. This file has a very simple format;
  each line defines a storage class for articles. The first matching storage
  class is used to store the article; if no storage class matches then INN will
  reject that article.

  A storage class is defined as a single line consisting of size fields:

        methodname:newsgroup pattern:storage class #:minsize:maxsize:options
  
  The first field, "methodname", is the name of the storage method used to
  store articles in this storage class. It should be set to "cnfs", "timehash",
  or the special storage method "trash" (which accepts the article but does
  not actually store it anywhere). Note that "traditional" is not a valid
  method name; the Storage Manager does not support traditional article
  storage, and if you are using traditional method then you should skip to the
  next section.

  The second field is a wildmat pattern in the same format used by the
  newsfeeds file, and determines what newsgroups are accepted by this storage
  class.

  The third field is a unique number identifying this storage class and should
  be between 0 and 255. It is used primarily to control article expiration.

  The fourth and fifth fields can be used to accept only articles in a certain
  size range into this storage class. A maxsize of zero means no upper limit
  (and of course a minsize of 0 would mean no lower limit, because an article
  is always great than zero bytes long.)
  
  The last field is the options field. Currently only CNFS uses this field; it
  should contain the name of the metacycbuff used to store articles in this
  storage class.

  For CNFS users, create one storage class for each metacycbuff that you have
  defined, listing what newsgroups are to be stored in that buffer.

  For timehash, the storage class IDs are used to store articles in separate
  directory trees so that different expiration policies can be applied to
  each storage class. You will need to divide up your newsgroups based on how
  long you want to retain articles in those groups, and create a storage class
  for each such collection of newsgroups. Make note of the storage class IDs
  you assign as they will be needed when you edit the expire.ctl file a bit
  later.

  6. overview.ctl (Required only if using the CNFS or timehash storage methods)

  The overview.ctl file determines where article overview information will be
  stored for each newsgroup. Overview is stored in one more more storage files
  identified by unique numbers between 0 and 254. Each line consists of the
  storage file number followed by a single colon and a wildmat pattern list
  of which newsgroups are to be stored in that file. As with storage.ctl, the
  first matching line is used.

  The exact way in which you distribute articles across multiple overview
  storage areas is not an exact science. As a start we suggest creating 27
  storage areas; the first 26 will be for newsgroups "a*" through "z*", and the
  27th will be for "*" (thus catching any groups that start with a non-letter,
  of which there are several). You can change the layout in the future by
  modifying this file and then waiting for the daily news expiration to run,
  at which time the overview data will be re-arranged for you during the
  expiration process.

  7. expire.ctl (REQUIRED)

  The expire.ctl file is the configuration for the expiration policy. See
  the expire.ctl man page for more details.

Creating the article spool (CNFS only)

  If you are using actual files as your CNFS buffers then you will need to
  pre-create these files with the Unix "dd" program.  For each cycbuff in your
  cycbuff.conf file, create the buffer with the following commands as the news
  user:

        dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/buffer bs=1k count=BUFFERSIZE
        chmod 0664 /path/to/buffer

   Substitute the buffer pathname and the buffer size (as listed in the
   cycbuff.conf file) in the appropriate spots in the commands. This will
   create a zero- filled file of the correct length; it may take a while to
   run, so be prepared to wait.

   Once you have created all of your cycbuffs, you are ready to continue with
   the next step of the installation.

Creating the db files

  At this point you need to set up the news database directory (~news/db).
  To make things easier you should su to your news user; otherwise the files
  you create will be owned by root and you'll have to change the owner and
  group IDs on the files manually. You should also have your working directory
  set to the ~news/db directory, and ~news/bin should be in your PATH so that
  you can execute INN support commands without typing full pathnames.

  To begin you'll need current active and newsgroups files. These may be
  downloaded from the following location:

        ftp.isc.org:/pub/usenet/CONFIG

  Download the files "active" and "newsgroups" and place them in your ~news/db
  directory.

  Next you need to create an empty history database. This can be accomplished
  by running the following command:

        makehistory -i

  When it finished, you need to move history.n* to history*.
  Finally, set the file permissions on all of the files you just created:

        chmod 0664 *

  Your news database files are now ready to go.

Setting up the news.daily cron job

  INN requires a special cron job to be set up on your system to run the
  news.daily script, which performs daily server maintenance tasks such as
  article expiration and the processing and rotation of the server logs.
  Since it will slow the server down while it is running, it should be run
  during periods of low server usage, such as in the middle of the night. To
  run it at 3 am, for example, add the following entry to the news user's
  crontab file:

        0 3 * * * /usr/local/news/bin/news.daily expireover lowmark

  or, if your system does not have per-user crontabs, put the following line
  into your system crontab instead:

        0 3 * * * su -c "/usr/local/news/bin/news.daily expireover lowmark" news

  The pathnames and user ID used above are the installation defaults; change
  them to match your installation if you used something other than the
  defaults.

  The parameters passed to news.daily in the above example are the most
  common (and usually the most efficient) ones to use. More information on what
  these parameters do can be found in the news.daily man page.

Starting the system

  INN is normally started via the shell script rc.news. This must be run as
  the news user and not as root. Put the following command (or something
  similar) into the system boot script:

	su news -c /usr/local/news/bin/rc.news

  If innd gets stopped or killed and you want to restart it without
  re-running rc.news, then run inndstart

	/usr/local/news/bin/inndstart

  If you added any values to the innflags variable in inn.conf, then you'll
  need to add the same values to the command line of inndstart if you run it
  by hand.
