News Leafsite mini-HOWTO
Florian Kuehnert, sutok@gmx.de
v0.4, 2001-12-01
This HOWTO will help you to configure a small leafsite for Usenet News
using the free software package Leafnode. For any questions, sugges
tions and comments, please write to Florian Kuehnert (sutok@gmx.de).
Please send any bugs you found in this document to me as well. (C)
1998 by Florian Kuehnert.
1. Why to use Leafnode?
In normal cases if you want to read news offline on your local
computer you have to install a news server software like INN or CNews.
Also you are in the need for an nntp or uucp connection to your
newsfeed. In fact that such packages contain much more features than
you need, you run better by installing Leafnode.
Leafnode is much simpler to use and very small but there are some
disadvantages: Leafnode is slow and loses news in about any error
situation. That's why you shouldn't use it for a big news server,
nevertheless, it´s appropriate for private users who don´t want spend
much time configuring INN.
2. Where to get Leafnode?
Leafnode is available at ftp://ftp.troll.no/pub/freebies/
<ftp://ftp.troll.no/pub/freebies/> and has been developed by Arnt
Gulbrandsen, an employee of Troll Tech AS. The recent version is 1.4
and in some distributions (for example Debian), Leafnode is included.
However, be sure to use at least version 1.4 as several critical bugs
were fixed.
3. How do I install it?
A small installation help comes with the package, but let's do it
together :-) -- If Leafnode >=1.4 is shipped with your distribution,
it would be the wisest to use the pre-compiled version and leave out
the steps 1 to 4.
1.) Be sure that there is no other news server running on your
computer. When you type
$ telnet localhost nntp
you should get an error message. If you get a connection get back to
the prompt of your shell, you should uninstall INN, CNews or whatever
you're running now and comment out the nntp-line in your
/etc/inetd.conf.
2.) Make sure that there is a user called "news", check in
/etc/password for the name. If there isn't, create one (either typing
$ adduser news
or using a tool shipped with your distribution).
3.) Unpack the sources:
$ tar xfz leafnode-1.4.tar.gz
and change into the source directory
$ cd leafnode-1.4
4.) Compile the program and install it
$ make; make install
5.) Edit /usr/lib/leafnode/config (it may be on any other place like
/etc/leafnode when you use a pre-compiled version of your Linux
distribution). The line "server =" should point to the news server of
your ISP.
6.) Edit /etc/nntpserver. It should include your local hostname
(localhost or whatever your computer name is, the command hostname
should help you). If in some startup file like /etc/profile or
/.bash_profile the environment variable is defined, you should adjust
to your computer´s name as well.
7.) Edit the /etc/inetd.conf: Make sure that there is no line
beginning with "nntp". If there is such a line, comment it out putting
a "#" before it. Then add the following line:
nntp stream tcp nowait news /usr/sbin/tcpd
/usr/local/sbin/leafnode
When someone (for example you :-) connects to your computer on the
NNTP port, leafnode is started as server process.
8.) Go online and run the program "fetch" as root or news. The first
time fetch is started, it will download a list of your ISP's
newsgroups. This may take some time depending on the speed on your
connection and the number of groups your ISP has in its active-File.
9.) Start your favorite newsreader (slrn, (r)tin and knews are not a
bad start) and subscribe to all your groups you read. Be careful not
just to subscribe these groups, but also to enter them, even when
they're empty.
10.) Start fetch again to download all the news of the groups want to
get.
4. How do I maintain leafnode?
Now you have got a working news system up and running, but there are
still some things to do. You may edit the file
/usr/lib/leafnode/config to set the expire dates of your groups. This
number means, when old messages should be deleted. The standard time
of 20 days is much often too long if you read some groups with much
traffic, 4 days or a week are in most cases a good time for your
system. You may change the value for all groups ("expire = n" to hold
all groups n days), but you tell leafnode to change this time for some
separate groups writing
groupexpire foo.bar n
to set the expire time for the group foo.bar to n days.
This setting alone won't make leafnode deleting old messages, a
separate program is responsible for this: texpire. It may be started
as a cron job or by command line. If your computer is up all the time,
you may want to add the following line to news' crontab file (to edit
it, log in as news and type "crontab -e" or as type root "crontab -u
news -e"):
0 19 * * * /usr/local/sbin/texpire
This line causes the cron daemon to star texpire every day at 19:00.
Check the crontab manual page for further adjustment. If your computer
is not regularly switched on, you may start texpire just from time to
time, when you notice that fetch gets slower. It works fine as with
the "cron-method".
5. How does it work?
Leafnode is a "real" NNTP server, which means that you can also login
from a different computer (via Internet, the local network etc.).
Every time you enter a group in your newsreader, your reader sends the
information to leafnode and requests it. If the group does not exist,
leafnode will create an empty file /var/spool/news/interesting.groups,
named like the group. When you run fetch the next time, it will fetch
the messages of the group. If a newsgroup has not been visited for a
certain time, leafnode will stop to fetch its articles and delete its
name in /var/spool/news/interesting.groups. So if you just subscribed
to a high traffic newsgroup by accident, you may delete its file there
by hand for that you won't have to download all the postings there for
the next week.
A week is not enough for you? You want to go on holiday for three
weeks and still get news? Unfortunately, there is no option in
leafnode to change it. But you can edit the file leafnode.h and
recompile it. The #defined constants are TIMEOUT_LONG and
TIMEOUT_SHORT, just set the time in seconds up. Another, simpler
solution is to define a cron-job that does "touch
/var/spool/news/interesting.groups/*" every night.
If you want to get a list of all avaible groups, look into the file
/usr/lib/leafnode/groupinfo, where you will find a short description
on the group.
If you want to re-read the list of newsgroups from your newsfeed (for
example when you want to read a new group), just delete the file
/var/spool/news/active.read. Fetch will create it the next time and
get the new list. Fetch will also re-read the grouplist from time to
time, so you don't have to do it by hand.
6. What newsreader should I use?
There is not *the* newsreader for Linux, like there is not *the*
editor. My favourite newsreader is emacs in gnus mode which is the
most configurable reader for Linux. Many people are using slrn and tin
on a terminal, many people use knews under X. There are also trn, nn
and a lot more reader, so just try what you like. The only reader you
shouldn't use is Netscape, it is big, feature-less, unstable, and it
creates sometimes broken postings. However, it is your personal
decision.
Anyway, knews is no bad idea for your first experiences as it is very
user-friendly and easy to understand.
7. Where do I get more information?
Some documentation is provided with the Leafnode package (read the
files INSTALL and README, the sources are also quite interesting). If
you want to know more about "professional" and "big" news servers,
check the INN FAQ (they are provided with the INN package). To get
information about your newsreader, type man "name of your newsreader"
or check for other files in /usr/doc.
If you have any questions concerning the news system, just ask in an
appropriate newsgroup (look in the news.software.ALL hierarchy).
If you have any question, comments or corrections concerning this
HOWTO, just write to me (sutok@gmx.de).
8. Copyright, License, Thanks
This document is Copyright(c) 1995, Florian Keuhnert.
It is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which you
should have received with it. You can also read it at
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/fdl.html.
I would like to thank Michael Schulz (michaels@home.on-luebeck.de) for
his help concerning some language problems and Cornelius Krasel
(krasel@wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de) for his "touch *"-trick.
