Usenet News HOWTO

Shuvam Misra (usenet at starcomsoftware dot com)

Revision History
Revision 2.12002-08-20Revised by: sm
New sections on Security and Software History, lots of other small additions and cleanup
Revision 2.02002-07-30Revised by: sm
Rewritten by new authors at Starcom Software
Revision 1.41995-11-29Revised by: vs
Original document; authored by Vince Skahan.
Table of Contents
1. What is the Usenet?
1.1. Discussion groups
1.2. How it works, loosely speaking
1.3. About sizes, volumes, and so on
2. Principles of Operation
2.1. Newsgroups and articles
2.2. Of readers and servers
2.3. Newsfeeds
2.4. Control messages
3. Usenet news software
3.1. A brief history of Usenet systems
3.2. C-News and NNTPd
3.3. INN
3.4. Leafnode
3.5. Suck
3.6. Carrier class software
4. Setting up CNews + NNTPd
4.1. Getting the sources and stuff
4.2. Compiling and installing
4.3. Configuring the system: What and how to configure files?
4.4. Testing the system
4.5. pgpverify and controlperms
4.6. Feeding off an upstream neighbour
4.7. Configuring outgoing feeds
5. Setting up INN
5.1. Getting the source
5.2. Compiling and installing
5.3. Configuring the system
5.4. Setting up pgpverify
5.5. Feeding off an upstream neighbour
5.6. Setting up outgoing feeds
5.7. Efficiency issues and advantages
6. Connecting email with Usenet news
6.1. Feeding Usenet news to email
6.2. Feeding email to news: the mail2news gateway
6.3. Using GNU Mailman as an email-NNTP gateway
7. Security issues
7.1. Intrusion threats
7.2. Vulnerabilities unique to the Usenet service
8. Access control in NNTPd
8.1. Host-based access control
8.2. User authentication and authorisation
9. Components of a running system
9.1. /var/lib/news: the CNews control area
9.2. /var/spool/news: the article repository
9.3. /usr/lib/newsbin: the executables
9.4. crontab and cron jobs
9.5. newsrun and relaynews: digesting received articles
9.6. doexpire and expire: removing old articles
9.7. nntpd and msgidd: managing the NNTP interface
9.8. nov, the News Overview system
9.9. Batching feeds with UUCP and NNTP
10. Monitoring and administration
10.1. The newsdaily report
10.2. Crisis reports from newswatch
10.3. Disk space
10.4. CPU load and RAM usage
10.5. The in.coming/bad directory
10.6. Long pending queues in out.going
10.7. Problems with nntpxmit and nntpsend
10.8. The junk and control groups
11. Usenet news clients
11.1. Usenet User Agents
11.2. Clients that transfer articles
11.3. Special clients
12. Our perspective
12.1. Efficiency issues of NNTP
12.2. C-News+NNTPd or INN?
13. Usenet software: a historical perspective
13.1. The quoted excerpts
14. Documentation, information and further reading
14.1. The manpages
14.2. Papers, documents, articles
14.3. O'Reilly's books on Usenet news
14.4. Usenet-related RFCs
14.5. The source code
14.6. Usenet newsgroups
14.7. We
15. Wrapping up
15.1. Acknowledgements
15.2. Comments invited
15.3. Copyright
15.4. About Starcom Software Private Limited
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