Last-modified: 2023-04-17
Posted-by: postfaq 1.17 (Perl 5.28.1)
Archive-name: usenet/software/inn2-faq
URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html
Posting-frequency: monthly

This FAQ is intended to answer frequently asked questions concerning the
current versions of INN (INN 2.x and later) seen on news.software.nntp.
It should be referred to in preference to the old INN FAQ, which only
documents versions up to 1.7. It mostly covers INN 2.3 and later; earlier
versions of INN may behave differently or use different configuration
files.

If you're reading this on Usenet, this FAQ is formatted as a minimal
digest, so if your news or mail reader has digest handling capabilities
you can use them to navigate between sections. In rn variants, you can
use Ctrl-G to skip to the next section; in Gnus, press Ctrl-D to break
each section into a separate article.

Please send any comments, suggestions, or updates to <eagle@eyrie.org>.
Bear in mind when sending me e-mail that I receive upwards of 800 mail
messages a day and have unanswered personal e-mail dating back six months
or more, so please don't expect an immediate response. You may receive
quicker responses by posting to news.software.nntp (even, due to the
quirky way in which I read mail and news, from me).

This FAQ is posted monthly to news.software.nntp, and is available on the
web at <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html>.

------------------------------

Subject: Contents

1. General Questions
1.1. What is INN?
1.2. What is the current version?
1.3. Where can I get INN?
1.4. Where can I find documentation?
1.5. What newsgroups are there for INN?
1.6. What mailing lists are there for INN?
1.7. How can I support INN development?
1.8. How can I contribute to INN?

2. Terms
2.1. What is tradspool (traditional spool)?
2.2. What is CNFS?
2.3. What are timehash and timecaf?
2.4. What is overview?
2.5. What are deferrals (NNTP code 431)?

3. Specific Problems
3.1. INN won't start after a new installation
3.3. The news server isn't keeping up with incoming news
3.4. news.notice is empty and the nightly report is missing things
3.5. INN is running out of file descriptors
3.6. Can't get debugging information out of INN
3.7. Articles aren't being sent to remote peers
3.8. sendmail isn't installed

4. Error Messages
4.1. innd: SERVER cant store article
4.2. innd: SERVER internal no control and/or junk group
4.3. Modification of read-only value attempted (Cleanfeed)
4.4. tradspool: could not open ... File exists
4.5. Binary posting to non-binary group (Cleanfeed)

5. Problems on Specific Systems
5.1. INN won't compile on SCO OpenServer / UnixWare / OpenUNIX
5.2. Using raw devices on Solaris destroys the partition table
5.3. Will INN run on Windows?
5.4. Why aren't INN's files where the documentation says they are?
5.5. Running INN on macOS

6. How Do I...
6.1. Set up a server with no external feeds, just local groups
6.2. Process a single control message
6.4. Feed all articles on a server to another server
6.5. Rename a newsgroup
6.6. Change the domain used for message IDs
6.7. Use INN without a direct news feed
6.8. Generate MRTG graphs for INN
6.9. Hide the junk and control groups from users
6.10. Modify the body of posts made through my server
6.11. Hide the Injection-Info header field
6.12. Run innd and nnrpd on separate ports
6.13. Back up and restore an INN installation
6.14. Find external feeds and set up peering

(Note that some numbers have been skipped. When questions are removed,
the remaining questions are not renumbered to avoid breaking links in
Usenet and mailing list archives.)

------------------------------

Subject: 1. General Questions

Contained in this section are general questions about INN, where to find
it, and things of that sort. It is aimed at the person who is not yet
running INN, or who has general questions about how it works.

------------------------------

Subject: 1.1. What is INN?

The README that comes with INN has this to say (in part):

INN (InterNetNews), originally written by Rich Salz, is an extremely
flexible and configurable Usenet / Netnews news server. For a
complete description of the protocols behind Usenet and Netnews, see
RFC 3977 (NNTP), RFC 4642 updated by RFC 8143 (TLS/NNTP), RFC 4643 (NNTP
authentication), RFC 4644 (streaming NNTP feeds), RFC 5536 (USEFOR), RFC
5537 (USEPRO), RFC 6048 (NNTP LIST additions), RFC 8054 (NNTP compression)
and RFC 8315 (Cancel-Lock) or their replacements.

In brief, Netnews is a set of protocols for exchanging messages between
a decentralized network of news servers. News articles are organized
into newsgroups, which are themselves organized into hierarchies.
Each individual news server stores locally all articles it has received
for a given newsgroup, making access to stored articles extremely fast.
Netnews does not require any central server; instead, each news server
passes along articles it receives to all of the news servers it peers
with, those servers pass the articles along to their peers, and so on,
resulting in "flood fill" propagation of news articles.

INN is free software, supported by Internet Systems Consortium and
volunteers around the world.

For a more complete answer, see that file. A full description of what
Usenet and Netnews are is beyond the scope of this document; for a
beginner's introduction, see the news.newusers.questions home page at
<http://www.tokak.us/nnq/>.

------------------------------

Subject: 1.2. What is the current version?

The most recently released version of INN is 2.7.1.

INN development proceeds in two branches, as with many other free software
projects. The STABLE branch is maintenance of the most recently released
stable version, and only bug fixes are added to it. The CURRENT branch is
the development version of the next release of INN.

As mentioned in the next section, when installing a new INN server, you
may wish to download the latest snapshot of the STABLE branch rather than
the current full release.

Note that the previous STABLE series for INN 2.6 terminated in the release
of INN 2.6.5 and current STABLE snapshots are based on INN 2.7. You
should therefore read the upgrade instructions in NEWS when upgrading from
a STABLE snapshot before July 11th, 2022 to one dated after that.

------------------------------

Subject: 1.3. Where can I get INN?

The download site for INN is <https://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/>. In that
directory are the various releases of INN, some additional documentation
(particularly of security holes), the original INN Usenix paper.

There is also a snapshots subdirectory, in which you will find two sets
of snapshots: ones at the top level, which are updated only when the
code changes, and ones in the daily subdirectory, which are generated
every day and retained for seven days. The daily snapshots with
STABLE in the name are the latest versions of the STABLE branch and
may have some additional bug fixes over the current released version.
The daily snapshots with CURRENT in the name are of the current
development version.

Please note: There is no guarantee that a snapshot will even compile, let
alone function well as a news server. In particular, the CURRENT branch
is under active development, and all sorts of things may be broken at any
given point in time. Use snapshots with caution, and don't use snapshots
from the CURRENT branch on any production system unless you're prepared to
debug the inevitable problems in code that's actively changing and not yet
thoroughly tested. (The STABLE snapshots should be fairly reliable,
however.)

------------------------------

Subject: 1.4. Where can I find documentation?

INN comes with extensive documentation. See the files INSTALL and README
at the top level of the source tree, for starters. In addition, nearly
every program and configuration file has its own Unix man page. The best
place to start is by reading the entire INSTALL file and then from there
discovering which configuration files and programs do what you want to do
and reading their individual man pages.

There are HTML conversions of the documentation that comes with recent
versions of INN available at:

<https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/>

For additional documentation beyond what is distributed with INN, follow
the links suggested in the above page.

The documentation that comes with INN is fairly technical in nature and
lacking in some more general details on configuring news servers. Some of
the links off of the INN home page have additional overview documentation
or documentation on how to set up servers for specific roles.

Another good resource is the newsgroup news.software.nntp (and the Google
archives thereof) and the archive of the inn-workers mailing list. A link
to the latter is off the INN page referenced above.