3. At this point, you should be looking at a line with "+" in the second field. The article should be on your server at this point.
If it's not, either it's been cancelled, or has already expired.
4. You're now interested in whether the article was sent to your peers.
At the end of the same line in $pathlog/news, innd puts all of the
peers it thinks should receive this article.
If you don't see a peer you expect there, it indicates that $pathetc/newsfeeds is not configured in the way you think it is.
5. If a peer is listed at the end of the line, the article should have
been fed to that peer.
If a peer doesn't have that article, it's possible that the article is spooled on your system somewhere. Check $pathoutgoing, or the
innfeed spool if the peer is configured to use innfeed. (It's probably easier to look for error messages in $pathlog/news.notice than to
actually wade around in $pathspool/innfeed.)
6. If you're sure the article isn't spooled, and it doesn't show up on the peer, you have to consider the possibility that the peer has rejected
the article. Alternatively, it's possible that the peer has some misconfiguration like the ones described above.
In either case, if you're sure that the article was offered to the peer
and not spooled, you will need the assistance of the peer's admin to investigate further. INN does not generally log enough information
about outgoing articles to be able to tell more from your server alone.
It may be possible to get a slight bit of information from the remote
server by connecting with telnet (usually to port 119) and issuing
"IHAVE <message-id>". The peer may respond with something like "435 Duplicate" which means that the problem is not likely to be with your
server (it may be still a problem with the article itself). If the
peer responds with something like "335", your server probably did not
offer the article after all.
If you really are at a dead end and need to get more information about what's going on with an outgoing feed, you can switch it from innfeed
to nntpsend (see INSTALL for instructions). You can then run it
manually with innxmit -dv, which will show the full conversation with
your remote peer.
------------------------------
Subject: 3.8. sendmail isn't installed
Yes, INN really does require sendmail. It uses sendmail to send out the daily reports, mail messages to moderators, gateway news to mail, send statistics to the TOP1000 project, mail errors to the news administrator, etc. and it assumes that you have a program installed as /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/lib/sendmail that it can use to do this. It does not speak SMTP,
nor is it likely to ever speak SMTP; it's hard enough maintaining a package to speak NNTP.
If you need a very simple local sendmail implementation that just sends
mail to a smarthost, there are several available (nullmailer, for
example).
------------------------------
Subject: 4. Error Messages
Explanations of specific error messages, including solutions where applicable.
INN logs nearly all messages to syslog, so in general these error messages will be found in syslog. If you aren't seeing anything from INN in syslog
at all, make sure that you have it set up correctly (see 3.3).
------------------------------
Subject: 4.1. innd: SERVER cant store article
You probably have a misconfigured storage.conf. In current versions of
INN, "no matching entry in storage.conf" is added to the end of this
message unless it really is a disk I/O problem, making the cause considerably clearer.
storage.conf(5) has this to say:
If an article doesn't match any entry, either by being posted to a
newsgroup that doesn't match any of the <wildmat> patterns or by being outside the size and expires ranges of all entries whose newsgroups
pattern it does match, the article is not stored and is rejected by
innd(8). When this happens, the error message
cant store article: no matching entry in storage.conf
is logged to syslog. If you want to silently drop articles matching
certain newsgroup patterns or size or expires ranges, assign them to the "trash" storage method rather than having them not match any storage
method entry.
One of the more frequent causes of this problem is misuse of the expires
key in storage.conf entries. Read the man page for storage.conf very carefully if you're using the expires key, since it may not do what you think it does. In particular, if you have a storage class that specifies expires with a min-time greater than 0, it won't match any article without an Expires header field (the vast majority of Usenet articles).
------------------------------
Subject: 4.2. innd: SERVER internal no control and/or junk group
Your active file isn't complete. Either it's been mangled by something or it's missing some required entries. Even if you're running a small stand-alone server for internal use that only carries a handful of groups, there are some pseudogroups used internally by INN that you have to have.
Since INN isn't running (it won't start when this error occurs), you can edit the active file by hand without worrying about stepping on INN's
toes. Make sure the following lines are present in the active file (if
the numbers are different, that's fine):
control 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.cancel 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.checkgroups 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.newgroup 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.rmgroup 0000000000 0000000000 n
junk 0000000000 0000000000 n
and then start INN again. The control* groups are for control messages (messages with a named group will be filed into it, and all other control messages will go into the top-level catch-all group). The n flag is so
that users won't post messages directly to the control* groups; control messages should be posted to the groups that they affect instead and INN will refile them automatically based on the Control header field.
If you have mergetogroups: set in inn.conf, you will also need to create
a newsgroup named "to". Otherwise, you will get the following error:
innd: SERVER internal no to group
------------------------------
Subject: 4.3. Modification of read-only value attempted (Cleanfeed)
INN 2.3 and later have an internal optimization to the interface to
embedded filters that makes filtering about 15-20% faster, but which disallows a trick that many versions of Cleanfeed use to count the number
of lines in the article. (This problem is fixed in current versions of Cleanfeed.)
To correct this problem, find the line in Cleanfeed that looks like:
$lines = $hdr{'__BODY__'} =~ tr/\n/\n/;
and change it to:
$lines = $hdr{'__LINES__'};
The __LINES__ hash value is set internally by all recent versions of INN
and is guaranteed to be correct.
------------------------------
Subject: 4.4. tradspool: could not open ... File exists
This error generally happens after a crash or unclean shutdown of innd
using the tradspool storage method, and is caused by overview information being out of sync with what articles are in the spool. When innd was restarted, it renumbered its active file (which determines the range of existing articles in each group and therefore what article number is assigned to new articles) based on the overview information. If there are newer articles already on disk that aren't mentioned in the overview (because the overview information for those articles hasn't been flushed
to disk yet), new incoming articles will get assigned the same number as
the existing article and then innd will fail to store the article and throttle with this error.
In INN 2.4 and later when using the tradindexed overview method, you can solve this problem by rebuilding the overview for any affected group. Throttle the server (if it isn't already) and then run:
tdx-util -R <path-to-articles> -n <newsgroup>
where <newsgroup> is the newsgroup that INN is complaining about and <path-to-particles> is the full path to the directory where the articles
for that group are stored (it's generally in the error message).
Immediately afterwards, run ctlinnd renumber for that newsgroup, and then unthrottle the server.
The general solution to this problem, which works with any version of INN and any overview method, is to shut down the server, delete all of your overview database, and then rebuild it from your news spool with:
makehistory -O -x -F
This takes a long time and is to some degree overkill. For versions of
INN prior to 2.5, you will also need to run ctlinnd renumber '' immediately after restarting INN.
A third and better solution in some cases is to just remove all articles
in the spool that have higher numbers than the numbers in the active file. Here's a Perl script that will do that. Just save this to a file, make it executable, and run it, giving it the path to the active file as the first argument and the path to the top of your tradspool news spool as the
second argument:
#!/usr/bin/perl
die "Usage: <name> <active> <spool-path>\n" unless @ARGV == 2;
open (ACTIVE, $ARGV[0]) or die "Can't open $ARGV[0]: $!\n";
while (<ACTIVE>) {
my ($group, $hi, $lo, $flag) = split;
my $directory = $group;
next if ($hi == 0 and $lo <= 1);
$directory =~ tr%.%/%;
$directory = $ARGV[1] . '/' . $directory;
if (-d $directory) {
opendir (DIR, $directory) or die "Can't open $directory: $!\n";
while (defined ($_ = readdir DIR)) {
unlink "$directory/$_" if ($_ > $hi);
}
closedir DIR;
}
}
If you're not already running INN 2.4, upgrade if you can. Not only can
you recover directly from this problem if you're using tradindexed
overview, but INN 2.4 does a better job of flushing data to disk and is
less likely to have this problem in the first place.
------------------------------
Subject: 4.5. Binary posting to non-binary group
This message does not actually come from INN. It's generated by
Cleanfeed, and if you're seeing it, that means that you have Cleanfeed installed. At least at one point, the default Red Hat installation of INN included Cleanfeed without documenting this particularly well.
In order to allow binaries in your local hierarchies, you should modify
the Cleanfeed configuration file to set bin_allowed to a regular
expression matching the groups that should allow binaries. Please don't allow binary postings to regular Usenet newsgroups that you don't know should have binaries, as they consume large amounts of bandwidth and possibly disk space for other sites.
For more information on Cleanfeed configuration options, see the Cleanfeed documentation and the comments in the default configuration file.
------------------------------
Subject: 5. Problems on Specific Systems
Problems specific to particular operating systems or platforms. Look here
if INN doens't behave as expected on your particular system, or if you're having trouble compiling INN in the first place.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.1. INN won't compile on SCO OpenServer
On SCO OpenServer, it's worth noting that with a shared Perl library,
Perl on this platform doesn't apparently generate the right link magic
to include the path to the dynamic Perl libraries. You need to either
set LD_RUN_PATH before building or LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running any binaries so that they can find the Perl libraries. (The former is
preferred, since then the path is encoded into the binaries and you
don't have to remember to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH later.)
------------------------------
Subject: 5.2. Using raw devices on Solaris destroys the partition table
If you use slice 2, or some other disk slice that includes the entire
disk, under Solaris as a raw partition for CNFS, you may run into this problem. The symptoms are that INN manages to initialize the cycbuffs
just fine, but then gets invalid device errors when it tries to open them again, and the disks show up in format as needing to be repartitioned.
The solution is to not use raw devices that include the first cylinder of the disk. Solaris doesn't protect the superblock from being overwritten
by an application writing to raw devices and includes it in the first cylinder of the disk, so unless you use a slice that starts with cylinder
1 instead of 0, INN will invalidate the partition table when it tries to initialize the cycbuff and all further accesses will fail until you repartition.
Generally all that has to be done is to repartition the disk with slice 0 starting from cylinder 1 and extending to the end of the disk and then
point INN at slice 0 instead of slice 2. You lose some small amount of space, but generally not enough to care about.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.3. Will INN work on Windows?
It won't out of the box. The standard INN distribution doesn't build on Windows. It has, however, been built for Cygwin (a Unix-like environment
for Windows) in the past and some of the necessary patches (although
perhaps not all of them) have been incorporated into current INN releases.
Search for http://homepage.mac.com/imeowbot/inn/ at <http://web.archive.org/> for the previous work. Don't forget to peruse INSTALL if you download and want to try this.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.4. Why aren't INN's files where the documentation says they are?
INN's default installation locations are intended to be convenient for sysadmins adding INN to their system without disturbing other software.
They don't match any of the standards used by various Linux distributions
or other Unix packaging systems. Because of that, distributors who supply INN packages often rearrange the files and directories.
Unfortunately, this is very confusing for system administrators, because
the documentation is not updated to reflect the modified locations of
files.
You can always get the details of how your system is configured by looking in inn.conf at "pathnews" and similar parameters. But for convenience,
here are comparisons of INN's default locations with some of the most
common packages.
(Data courtesy of John F. Morse.)
DEFAULT DEBIAN
pathnews: /usr/local/news /usr/lib/news
pathbin: /usr/local/news/bin /usr/lib/news/bin
pathcontrol: /usr/local/news/bin/control /usr/lib/news/bin/control
pathdb: /usr/local/news/db /var/lib/news
pathetc: /usr/local/news/etc /etc/news
pathfilter: /usr/local/news/bin/filter /etc/news/filter
pathhttp: /usr/local/news/http /var/www/inn
pathlog: /usr/local/news/log /var/log/news
pathrun: /usr/local/news/run /run/news
pathtmp: /usr/local/news/tmp /var/spool/news/incoming/tmp
pathspool: /usr/local/news/spool /var/spool/news
patharchive: /usr/local/news/spool/archive /var/spool/news/archive patharticles: /usr/local/news/spool/articles /var/spool/news/articles pathincoming: /usr/local/news/spool/incoming /var/spool/news/incoming pathoutgoing: /usr/local/news/spool/outgoing /var/spool/news/outgoing pathoverview: /usr/local/news/spool/overview /var/spool/news/overview
DEFAULT FEDORA
pathnews: /usr/local/news /usr/libexec/news
pathbin: /usr/local/news/bin /usr/libexec/news
pathcontrol: /usr/local/news/bin/control /usr/libexec/news/control
pathdb: /usr/local/news/db /var/lib/news
pathetc: /usr/local/news/etc /etc/news
pathfilter: /usr/local/news/bin/filter /usr/libexec/news/filter
pathhttp: /usr/local/news/http /var/lib/news/http
pathlog: /usr/local/news/log /var/log/news
pathrun: /usr/local/news/run /run/news
pathtmp: /usr/local/news/tmp /var/lib/news/tmp
pathspool: /usr/local/news/spool /var/spool/news
patharchive: /usr/local/news/spool/archive /var/spool/news/archive patharticles: /usr/local/news/spool/articles /var/spool/news/articles pathincoming: /usr/local/news/spool/incoming /var/spool/news/incoming pathoutgoing: /usr/local/news/spool/outgoing /var/spool/news/outgoing pathoverview: /usr/local/news/spool/overview /var/spool/news/overview
In addition, the FreeBSD port uses the standard INN paths except that it puts logs in /var/log/news and pathtmp in /usr/local/news/spool/tmp.
Most packages install INN's man pages into a system man directory (/usr/share/man or /usr/local/man) rather than into a separate man
directory under news's home directory.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.5. Running INN on macOS
Richard Tobin provided the following advice in news.software.nntp on 2013-06-29 based on experience with running INN on Snow Leopard:
Mac OS X, at least through the GUI, won't let you create a group with
the same name as a user. So you can't use "news" for both.
The Perl module GD isn't installed by default. GPG is not installed
by default.
You probably want to turn off Spotlight for the news spool directory.
Configure didn't get the Perl compile flags right. PERL_CPPFLAGS had
"-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc", but on this x86_64 machine the
files for the other architectures don't seem to be installed. I
edited Makefile.global by hand to remove them.
I needed to tell the application firewall to allow innd to accept
incoming connections. (A window pops up to ask you, but this doesn't
help when you're connected by ssh!)
When I ran rc.news form a terminal window, it stopped working when I
logged out. This is because of MacOS's convoluted and undocumented
way of doing DNS lookups. Using "nohup" fixed it -- not because of
anything to do with SIGHUP, but because nohup calls an undocumented
function related to "vprocmgr". Running from launchd shouldn't have
this problem, and it appears to be fixed in Mountain Lion.
The Perl flags come from the Perl configuration; this problem is fixed
with current builds of macOS.
------------------------------
Subject: 6. How Do I...
This section documents various common or uncommon tasks or configurations that people want to do with INN. It is mostly taken from frequently asked questions in news.software.nntp.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.1. Set up a server with no external feeds, just local groups
The basic steps are to set up a newsfeeds file empty except for internal feeds like controlchan or overchan (if you're using either), have only localhost in incoming.conf, and start INN with the default minimal active file. Then, create the groups you want to carry with ctlinnd newgroup.
Set up reading permissions using readers.conf as appropriate for your organization.
In other words, it's very much like setting up any other instance of INN, but you don't bother with innfeed, nntpsend, or any of their configuration files. INN may also complain that you have no feeds in newsfeeds; this is harmless and can be ignored.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.2. Process a single control message
To process a single control message, you can use controlchan from the command line. Just type either:
echo /path/to/article-file | controlchan
or:
echo @token@ | controlchan
if you have the storage API token of the article. (This assumes
controlchan is in a directory in your path.) This is useful mostly for testing; if you just want to create, remove, or change a group, it's
easier to use ctlinnd (newgroup, rmgroup, or changegroup).
------------------------------
Subject: 6.4. Feed all articles on a server to another server
To feed all articles on an existing server to another one, regardless of
how they're stored on the server, first tell the new server to accept articles regardless of how old they are (otherwise, INN will reject
articles older than artcutoff in inn.conf) and disable your filtering:
ctlinnd param c 0
ctlinnd perl n
ctlinnd python n
Note that rejected articles are remembered during the number of days specified by the /remember/ line in expire.ctl; so, in case you forgot
to change the above parameters, you'll have to wait that number of
days before being able to inject them again. Another possibility is to
set /remember/ to 0, run the expire process (for instance via news.daily called with the same parameters as in crontab, plus "notdaily"),
undo the change in expire.ctl and then start the feed again.
You may also want to set xrefslave to true in inn.conf and then restart
INN on the new server if you want to keep the same article numbers as you had on the old server. (It is notably helpful for news clients because
they otherwise get confused by an article renumbering in newsgroups they
are subscribed to.)
Next, make sure that the old server is listed in incoming.conf of the new server, and reload incoming.conf with ctlinnd to pick up that change.
Also make sure that the new server carries exactly the same set of newsgroups as the old server.
You may also want the new server not to propagate the articles it will receive during this feeding operation, by checking that the newsfeeds
file of the new server is not configured to propagate articles to other peers or controlchan (otherwise old control articles may be reprocessed).
Then try these commands (a variation on commands posted by Katsuhiro
Kondou to inn-workers) on the old server:
cd <pathdb in inn.conf>
perl -ne 'chomp; our ($hash, $timestamps, $_) = split " "; \
print "$_\n" if $_' history \
| tr . / > <pathoutgoing in inn.conf>/list
innxmit server list
where <pathdb> is the path to the directory containing the history file (usually ~news/db), <pathoutgoing> is the path to the outgoing spool directory (usually ~news/spool/outgoing), and server is the name of the
new news server to which you're feeding the articles. The result file contains tokens ordered by arrival time on the old server (which is
usually roughly the same as the posting time). In case the history
file was not populated chronologically, it is better to sort it by
posting time so that articles are fed in the right order. This can be achieved with the following command:
sort -t '~' -k3n < history > history.sorted
And then, consider history.sorted instead of history for the next steps.
If the new server has just been installed or is known not to already have the articles you will feed it, you may want to add the "-c" flag to
innxmit so as to skip the check for the presence of every article before transferring them.
In case you wish to only feed articles arrived on the old server between
two dates, you can adapt the previous commands with a condition on the $arrived variable (or the $posted variable if you prefer to use the Date header field instead of the actual arrival time). For instance, the following commands will feed articles arrived between two given
timestamps (that can be computed with the convdate utility shipped
with INN).
convdate -n '15 Apr 2014 20:42 +0200' '16 Apr 2014 12:37 +0200'
returns the two corresponding timestamps 1397586540 and 1397644620 that
can then be used to retrieve a subset of articles to feed:
cd <pathdb in inn.conf>
perl -ne 'chomp; our ($hash, $timestamps, $_) = split " "; \
my ($arrived, $expires, $posted) = split("~", $timestamps); \
print "$_\n" if $_ and $arrived >= 1397586540 \
and $arrived <= 1397644620' history \
| tr . / > <pathoutgoing in inn.conf>/list
innxmit server list
Other conditions may be added in the print line to select a subset of articles to feed. For instance if you want only articles for the fr.* hierarchy, you may add the following condition which will retrieve and
parse the contents of the Xref field of every article to find the information (note that it will take some time to run, depending on the number of articles to parse):
and qx/sm -q -H "$_" | grep Xref/ =~ / fr\.\S+:\d+/
If innxmit stops transferring articles (with for instance an error like "rewriting batch file and exiting"), just re-execute it. The "-d" flag
is useful to add if you want to see the feeding progress.
When done, set xrefslave to false in inn.conf again if you changed it and then either restart INN on the new server (necessary if you changed xrefslave) or use another ctlinnd param command to set the cutoff value
back to what's specified in inn.conf and use ctlinnd perl and ctlinnd
python to reactivate your filters.
Please note that when using xrefslave, this method requires that all of
the articles in your spool have Xref header fields. Current versions of INN will always add an Xref header field, but very old versions (earlier 1.x versions) will only add an Xref header field to crossposted articles. If you're trying to import such a spool, you'll need to modify all of those articles to add an Xref header field.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.5. Rename a newsgroup
INN has no native support for renaming a newsgroup, and doing so is difficult, so the best advice is to not do this. If there's a way that
you can just create the new newsgroup, encourage people to start using it, and then remove the old newsgroup, I recommend that. It's much easier.
Although it is not a renaming, it is also possible to create an alias. Articles cannot be posted to that newsgroup, but they can be received
from other sites and treated as if they were actually posted to the
group named after the equal sign. However, their Newsgroups header field body is not modified.
ctlinnd newgroup group.to.file.under y
ctlinnd changegroup old.group =group.to.file.under
Creating an alias newsgroup is useful in case you want residual articles received under the old newsgroup name to be filed into the new group.
As for a renaming, if it really must be done, it's best if you're using
the tradspool storage method. The newsgroup of an article is stored in
the Newsgroups header field and in the Xref header field of the article
as stored on disk (and possibly in Followup-To), as well as determining where the overview information is stored, and in the case of tradspool
is also encoded in the article's storage token. To rename a newsgroup
in tradspool, stop the server, move the directory containing all of
the articles to its appropriate new location in the news spool, edit
every article to change the old name to the new name in Newsgroups, Followup-To, and Xref, create the new newsgroup with ctlinnd newgroup,
and then rebuild history and overview with makehistory.
The following bit of Perl may help with the renaming (from Jeffrey
Vinocur):
#!/usr/bin/perl -wi
my ($src, $dst) = (shift, shift);
die "Usage: $0 oldgroup newgroup [file1 [file2 ...]]\n"
unless(defined $dst);
while(<>) {
s/$src/$dst/g if 1 .. /^$/ and /^(Newsgroups|Followup-To|Xref):/i;
print;
} continue {
close ARGV if eof;
}
Note that this may cause some problems if the newsgroup you're renaming is contained in the name of another newsgroup to which messages in that group are crossposted. If that's a problem, you may have to use a more sophisticated script.
If any articles were crossposted to other newsgroups, you'll also have to find and recreate the links in those newsgroups to the new location of the articles (if the links were hard links and the process of changing the
Xref, Followup-To, Newsgroups header fields didn't break those links, you may be lucky and be able to skip this).
If you're using another storage method, this is harder, although with timehash you may be able to just change the Newsgroups, Xref, Followup-To header fields of the articles in that newsgroup and then rebuild history
and overview as above.
One other approach that can be used regardless of storage method is to refeed the articles to the server into a new newsgroup. This approach
works best if you're also changing news servers at the same time;
otherwise, the message IDs of the articles will already be in history, and you'll have to change the message IDs of all of the messages or remove
them from the history database (such as by moving the articles away, changing /remember/ to 0 so that old history entries won't be retained,
and then running expire to purge them out of history). To do this, get
all of the messages into a directory (by pulling them down via NNTP or
some other method), change the Newsgroups, Xref, and Followup-To header fields to rename the newsgroup, and then create a file containing paths to all of the articles, one per line. You can then use that file as input to innxmit, pointing it at the server to which to feed the articles, and if
the articles aren't listed in history on that server and it carries the
new group, they will be accepted into the new newsgroup.
Note that if you use this method and something goes wrong the first time, the message IDs will probably have all been added to history on the new server and the articles now will never be accepted until those entries are removed from history again (or all the message IDs changed).
------------------------------
Subject: 6.6. Change the domain used for message IDs
By default, any message identifier generated by INN will use the fully qualified domain name of the local system for the right-hand side of
message IDs. In some cases, this isn't desirable for various reasons
(the server may have an internal name that doesn't make sense on Usenet
at large, or one may not want to expose the name of the server).
INN still does not have a dedicated parameter to change the right-hand
side of message identifiers. While waiting for it, there's a trick
involving a special use of the domain: parameter (normally meant to be
use only for what is related to DNS).
In INN 2.7.1 and later, you can use an explicit domain: key in an access stanza of readers.conf to use its value as the right-hand side of message identifiers. (Even though domain: is set in inn.conf, note that this parameter also needs being present in readers.conf so as to trigger the expected behaviour).
In INN 2.3.3 and later, you can set virtualhost: to true in an access
stanza of readers.conf and then set domain: in the same stanza, and all posts coming from connections to which that access stanza applies will
use that domain to generate message IDs. So if you need to change the
domain used to generate message IDs for every local post from your
server, just add virtualhost: and domain: keys to every access stanza
in readers.conf. (Yes, this is really overkill for this option.)
------------------------------
Subject: 6.7. Use INN without a direct news feed
INN is designed to be used as a regular news server, receiving direct news feeds from other news servers and sending news directly to other news
Sysop: | Keyop |
---|---|
Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
Users: | 285 |
Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
Uptime: | 77:52:47 |
Calls: | 6,489 |
Files: | 12,096 |
Messages: | 5,276,459 |