Olaf Kirch - Linux Network Administrator Guide, Second Edition

Some people claim that Usenet is a conspiracy by modem and hard disk vendors.

There may be a difference between the groups that exist at your site and those that your site is willing to receive. For example, the subscription list might specify comp.all, which should send all newsgroups below the comp hierarchy, but at your site you might not list several of the comp newsgroups in the active file. Articles posted to those groups will be moved to junk.

Note that this should be the crontab of news; file permissions will not be mangled.

You can obtain the C News source distribution from its home site at ftp.cs.toronto.edu /pub/c-news/c-news.tar.Z

It is not uncommon for an article posted in say, Hamburg, to go to Frankfurt via reston.ans.net in the Netherlands, or even via some site in the U.S.

As shipped with C News, compcun uses compress with the 12-bit option, since this is the lowest common denominator for most sites. You may produce a copy of the script, say compcun16, for which you use 16-bit compression. The improvement is not too impressive, though.

The article's date of arrival is kept in the middle field of the history line and given in seconds since January 1, 1970.

I don't know why this happens, but it does from time to time.

I wouldn't try this on the Internet, either.

When posting an article over NNTP, the server always adds at least one header field, NNTP-Posting-Host:. The field contains the client's hostname.

The same problem exists with the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), although most mail transport agents now provide mechanisms to prevent spoofing.

leafnode is available by anonymous FTP from wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de in the /pub/ directory.

Very small news sites should consider a caching NNTP server program like leafnode, which is available at http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~krasel/leafnode.html.

This is indicated by the Date: header field; the limit is usually two weeks.

Threading 1,000 articles when talking to a loaded server could easily take around five minutes, which only the most dedicated Usenet addict would find acceptable.

The name apparently stands for NetNews Read& Post Daemon.

PGP and GPG are tools designed to authenticate or encrypt messages using public key techniques. GPG is the GNU free version of PGP. GPG may be found at http://www.gnupg.org/, and PGP may be found at http://www.pgp.com/.

Things improve drastically if the NNTP server does the threading itself and lets the client retrieve the threads databases; INN does this, for instance.

This is the reason why you will get ugly error messages when invoking tin as superuser. But you shouldn't do routine work as root, anyway.

Note that C News (described in Chapter 21, C News) doesn't update this low-water mark automatically; you have to run updatemin to do so.

Their order has to agree with that of the entries in the (binary) MASTER file.