tilde.club/docs/usenet.md

Usenet in 60 Seconds

Installation

Create Linux machine

$ sudo -i
root # yum update


root # yum install gcc
root # yum install cpan
root # yum install python-devel

root # Get the Mime parser (for controlchan [idk wtf that is])
root # cpan -f install Mime::Parser

root # wget ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/inn-2.5.4.tar.gz
root # tar xvf inn-2.5.4.tar.gz
root # cd inn-2.5.4

root # groupadd news
root # useradd -g news -d /usr/local/news news

root # ./configure \
--with-python \
--enable-libtool \
--with-gnu-ld \
--with-sendmail=/usr/sbin/sendmail \
--enable-tagged-hash \
--enable-shared \
LIBS="-lpthread"

root # vim /etc/hostname # set your hostname to something like `news`
root # vim /etc/hosts # change local.localdomain to the new hostname

# should probably restart the machine to get the new hostname

root # su - news
news $ vim etc/inn.conf

The top of my inn.conf looks like:

mta:                         "/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -oem %s"
organization:                "tilde.club"
ovmethod:                    tradindexed
hismethod:                   hisv6
pathhost:                    news
pathnews:                    /usr/local/news

#runasuser:                  # default: news
#runasgroup:                 # default: news

# General Settings

domain:                      news.tilde.club
#innflags:
mailcmd:                     /usr/local/news/bin/innmail
#server:

Then you need to configure readers.conf to say who can connect, how, and what kind of things they get when they log in.

news $ mv etc/readers.conf etc/readers.conf.old
news $ vim etc/readers.conf

A rudimentary readers.conf looks like:

# as this machine will only listen to connections from the tilde.club server, I don't mind having
# such a wild rule.
auth tilde.club {
        hosts: *
        default: <PUBLIC>
}

access default {
        users: <PUBLIC>
        newsgroups: "*,!admin.*,!control,!control.*,!mode,!junk"
}

access admin {
        users: "artem,ftrain@tilde.club"
        newsgroups: *
        access: "RPA"
        perlfilter: false
}

Ensure that all the history files have the right permissions:

news $ chmod 644 ~/db/*

And finally set up the cron job to expire messages. Make sure you run this as the news user:

0 3 * * * ~/bin/news.daily expireover lowmark

Running the server

There are some scripts in the contrib which will help you get started, namely sample.init.script. I think it goes into /etc/init.d, though I might be mistaken. Another option is a long-running tmux session. Either way, the following runs the server:

news $ bin/rc.news start

And the following stops it:

news $ bin/rc.news stop

All errors are logged to ~/log/. ~/log/errlog is a good resource for finding out why your news server isn't running.