Disk space and memory issues: You need around 2 gigs of space to run a small feed, and probably at least 4 gigs to run a full feed. The Nemeth book says you need 64 megs of ram-I'm doing ok with 40 megs, but my user base is small. I tried INN initially on a DX50 486, and it was a pit pokey. I have since upgraded to a P133 and am now able to do stuff like run Xwindows acceptably with INN running in the background. If you can, devote the entire machine to INN, as it is a memory and CPU pig.
Now for the configuration. Let's make some assumptions: Your feed site is news.redhat.com, and your site is news.rookie.com. Since news is most likely an alias for another host name, lets say news.redhat.com is blue.redhat.com and news.rookie.com is green.rookie.com.
Now you need to edit the control files.
You need to obtain a copy of an active file. This is the list
of newsgroups that you will carry on your system. If you want a full feed,
get the active file from your feed site, and edit it at will. However,
before you use the active file from another site, it will need to be modified.
Copy the active file to /var/lib/news (this is where your history
file, active file, active.times and newsgroups file go). There will probably
be a placeholder active file there, and you may safely delete it, since
it isn't what you want to use. Rename your acquired active file to ``upstream.active''
and process it with the following command:
cat upstream.active | awk '{ printf("%s 000000000 000000000 %s\n", $1, $4)
}' > active
(All on one line.)
You should now have an active file with all 000000000's
in it.
You now need to obtain your upstream newsgroups file, which
contains descriptions of the active newsgroups. This file also should exist
in the /var/lib/news subdirectory. You should now be done with the
/var/lib/news subdirectory.
You should now go to the /etc/news subdirectory. You want to
edit the expire.ctl file, which is used by the expire program. An initial
expire.ctl file may look like this:
/remember/:14
*:A:3:4:5
You now need to edit the newsfeeds file. This file indicates how articles
should be sent to upstream or downstream sites. The newsfeed file is sensitive
to typos, so be careful. You need an entry in the newsfeeds file pointing
at your feeder site. You need this in your newsfeeds file:
ME\
:*,!control,!junk,!rookie.*::\
redhat.com\
:*,!control,!junk\
:Tf,Wnm:news.redhat.com
These two entries should be near the top of your newsfeeds file.
The nnrp.access file allows newsreader clients access to the news server.
To allow hosts in the rookie.com domain to read news, this entry should
be in nnrp.access:
*.rookie.com:Read Post:::*
This file tells INN which hosts are allow to transfer articles to the
local site. Any hosts not listed in this file are handed off to the nnrp.access
file. Important, you need to have your local hostname listed in this file!
news.rookie.com should have this in its hosts.nntp file:
news.redhat.com
blue.redhat.com
green.rookie.com
You may not need to place the actual hostname in there, but it won't hurt. Remember, in the above example, news and blue are both hostnames for the same machine in the redhat.com domain.
organization: Top Server
server: green.rookie.com
domain: rookie.com
fromhost: green.rookie.com
moderatormailer: %s@uunet.uu.net
pathhost: green.rookie.com
In the last line of this command, there is a print \$3. This
should be changed to print \$4.
This file needs to be edited.
redhat.com:blue.redhat.com::
blue.redhat.com::
news.redhat.com::
We are just about there. We now need to make sure the news.daily
script gets run once a day in order to be articles get expired and
such. This entry needs to be added to news's chrontab:
6 4 * * * /usr/lib/news/bin/news.daily > /dev/null 2>&1 &
Edit /etc/rc.d/rc.news and change DOINNWATCH=false to DOINNWATCH=true
Ok, you should now be able to reboot, and INN should be running when
you come back up. Assuming your feed is turned on/, you should
start getting articles. Examine the /var/log/messages file to see
how things are going. Since the user news will send messages
to itself, you will want to edit the /etc/aliases file so that messages
sent to news get sent to your user account.