INN 2.4.3 review
DownloadThe InterNetNews package (INN) is a complete Usenet system
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The InterNetNews package (INN) is a complete Usenet system. It includes innd, an NNTP server, and nnrpd, a newsreading server. INN separates hosts that feed you news from those that have users reading news. INN was originally written by Rich Salz (grab the USENIX paper Rich wrote about it here). ISC took over development of INN in 1996 after Rich was unable to continue supporting it and many variants of the software were forming.
If you are interested in receiving notice of future releases of INN, send a subscribe message to inn-announce-request@isc.org to get on the announcements mailing list. At this time, ISC regrets that we do not have the resources to offer support or training on the INN software. As partnerships in this area develop, we will post updated information here.
A news server performs three basic functions: it accepts articles from other servers and stores them on disk, sends articles it has received out to other servers, and offers stored news articles to readers on demand. It additionally has to perform some periodic maintenance tasks, such as deleting older articles to make room for new ones.
Normally a news server just stores all of the news articles it had received in a file system. Users could then read news by reading the article files on disk (or more commonly using news reading software that did this efficiently). These days, news servers are almost always stand-alone systems and news reading is supported via network connections. A user who wants to read a newsgroup opens that newsgroup in their newsreader software, which opens a network connection to the news server d sends requests for articles and related information. The protocol that a newsreader uses to talk to a news server and that a news server uses to talk to another news server over TCP/IP is called NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol).
INN supports accepting articles via either NNTP connections or via UUCP. innd, the heart of INN, handles NNTP feeding connections directly; UUCP newsfeeds use rnews (included in INN) to hand articles off to innd. Other parts of INN handle feeding articles out to other news servers, most commonly innfeed (for real-time outgoing feeds) or nntpsend and innxmit (used to send batches of news created by innd to a remote site via TCP/IP). INN can also handle outgoing UUCP feeds.
The part of INN that handles connections from newsreaders is nnrpd.
Also included in INN are a wide variety of supporting programs to handle periodic maintenance and recovery from crashes, process special control messages, maintain the list of active newsgroups, and generate and record a staggering variety of statistics and summary information on the usage and performance of the server.
INN also supports an extremely powerful filtering system that allows the server administrator to reject unwanted articles (such as spam and other abuses of Usenet).
INN is free software, supported by Internet Systems Consortium and volunteers around the world. See "Supporting the INN Effort" below.
What's New in This Release:
nnrpd/group.c: Return the correct 0 0 0 response to LISTGROUP when the group is empty rather than returning no such group.
authprogs/libauth.c: Set the length of the IPv4 sockets on platforms with a sin_len element in struct sockaddr. Reported by Gea-Suan Lin
scripts/innreport_inn.pm: Ignore or parse some log messages from newer versions, just for better news.notice parsing when bouncing between versions.
INN 2.4.3 keywords