On: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 13:42:08 -0400 Hank Fay writes:
>
> Miquel,
> Is INN what I would use to set up a news server for my personal use
> (with clients coming over the net to use it, of course), with no
> usenets groups, sucking, feeding, etc? Or is there something else I
> should look at? Oh -- and how much of a bear is it to set up?
I would suggest INN for you. The Debian package is an excellent one,
you just need to configure your newsfeeds file and can start using it.
I setup the package without any problem and no former experience with
any news server apart from leafnode. Start with looking at the README
files in you /usr/doc/inn directory, they will tell you where to
start.
If you have enough space on your /var/spool/news partition and the
expiry is correctly set up, the only maintainence neccessary is to
create new groups (if you don't want to syncronize your active file
with your ISP) and sometimes looking at the news.daily output if there
is any problem.
For retrieving the articles from your ISP I suggest using suck. It
contains a script for connecting to your ISP, sending new articles
from your side and retrieving new ones from the rest of the world. I
have written my own script to have the ability to get news from more
than one location (and using separate config files, batch files, temp,
message, and data directories for each server).
An alternative could be leafnode, I used that before advancing to INN
and had some problems with its performance and its (at that time)
inability to handle news coming from more than one server.
If you want to read a good book about INN and its installation and
configuration I'd suggest "Managing Usenet" written by Henry Spencer &
David Lawrence, published at O'Reilly. It's (IMHO) the first book
that covers the whole range of administrating CNews and INN. But the
INN-FAQ (part of the Debian package) covers a lot of the problems
occured to other peoples before too.
Torsten
