LEAFNODE

Overview
Installation
Update from previous versions
1. Update from versions < 2.0
2. Update from versions < 1.9.3
3. Update from versions < 1.6
Files and directories
1. The main configuration file
2. The filter file
Local newsgroups
Deinstallation
Frequently asked questions
Copyright

1. OVERVIEW

Leafnode is a USENET software package designed for small sites, with a few tens of readers and only a slow link to the net. It is developed on Linux, but has been reported to compile and run also under any BSD flavour, Solaris and Irix.

The Leafnode package consists of several programs, three essential ones and several add-ons.

Leafnode is the NNTP server. It talks to the normal news clients, and stores readership data.
Fetchnews is the NNTP news-gatherer. It looks at the readership data Leafnode stores, and selects what groups to pull news from. It also transfers your contributions to one or more upstream servers.
Texpire is responsible for deleting old and uninteresting news. It deletes all discussion threads that are old and not recently read.

These are the add-ons:

Applyfilter lets you delete articles from your local news spool which fit a certain pattern.
Checkgroups inserts the titles of newsgroups into the newsgroup database.
Newsq shows which news are waiting to be transferred to your upstream server(s).
Rnews sorts an UUCP batch or articles downloaded by other means into the news spool.

Only groups that someone has been reading in the past week are fetched from the upstream NNTP server. When someone stops reading a group, fetchnews will stop reading that group a week later (this is the default which can be configured), and when someone starts reading a group, fetchnews will grab all the articles it can in that group the next time it runs.

Leafnode's distinguishing features are:

Leafnode is written with the novice user in mind. It is very easy to install and configure and requires no manual intervention once installed. Leafnode tries very hard to recover automatically from error situations.
Compared to other servers, leafnode uses very little disk space and bandwidth. Of course this also depends on how many users are accessing your server and is probably not true for 300-user sites.
The newsspool can be easily manipulated by small scripts because it is maintained in plain file format. Some tiny examples are in the subdirectory tools/ .

Of course, Leafnode also has weaknesses. Some of these are:

In just any error situation, leafnode tries to fix its problems by deleting the offending article. This can cause leafnode to lose news.
Due to its open architecture, Leafnode scales very badly.

The current version of leafnode is available from http://www.leafnode.org/ .

There is also a leafnode mailing list. Send mail to

leafnode-list@wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de

with "Subscribe" in the Subject: to subscribe.

2. INSTALLATION

Leafnode uses GNU autoconf to determine the configuration of the machine it will be compiled on. Type

         sh ./configure

to coreate an appropriate Makefile and config.h .

The configure script can take some flags:

--with-ipv6       use this if you have and want to use IPV6
--prefix=[dir]    Leafnode installs itself normally in the /usr/local/sbin
                  directory. If you want to use another directory, use this
		  flag. For example, if you want to install leafnode in
		  /usr/sbin, use --prefix=/usr/sbin .

Type

          make

There should be no errors. Dependent on your compiler, you might get the warning:

    /fetchnews.c: In function `nntpactive':
    /fetchnews.c:1062: warning: `%y' yields only last 2 digits of year

Don't worry about it.

Create a user "news" if you don't have one.
Type
```
          make install
```
If you prefer an installation with the binaries stripped free of symbols, use
```
	  make install-strip
```
instead.
If you are updating leafnode from a previous version, see the section "Updating" below.
Edit $(LIBDIR)/config. $(LIBDIR) defaults to /etc/leafnode, but can be adjusted in the Makefile. For documentation, see below or config.example and leafnode(8). It is absolutely necessary to change the "server" parameter to point it to your upstream news server (generally the one of your IP provider). Make sure the environment variable $NNTPSERVER or /etc/nntpserver points to your own host so clients will talk to leafnode rather than try to go to the upstream server.
If you want to use filtering of the incoming spool, see the section on the filter file below.
Set up a cron job (as user "root" or "news") to run texpire every night or maybe every week. Here is my crontab line, which runs nightly:
```
0 4 * * * /usr/local/sbin/texpire
```
I did "crontab -u news -e" as root to edit the crontab file, and added this line. Substituting "1" for the third "*", thus:
```
0 4 * * 1 /usr/local/sbin/texpire
```
tells cron to run texpire at 4am every Monday morning.
Make sure fetchnews is run at the appropriate time. If you have a full-time link, run it out of cron (as "news" again); if not, run it when your connection to the net is established. If it is run as root it will change to user "news". If you use PPP, you can run fetchnews from /etc/ppp/ip-up.
Edit /etc/inetd.conf so that $(BINDIR)/leafnode is executed for incoming NNTP connections. Here is my inetd.conf line:
```
nntp    stream  tcp     nowait  news    /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/sbin/leafnode
```
This starts leafnode for all connections on the nntp port, subject to /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny screening. If you don't have tcp wrappers (i.e. /usr/sbin/tcpd) you might use this line instead:
```
nntp    stream  tcp     nowait  news    /usr/local/sbin/leafnode
```
However, using leafnode without tcp wrappers is strongly discouraged since it opens up your news server to abuse.
After these changes, force inetd to read the changed configuration file by sending it the HANGUP signal. To achieve this, issue the following command (as root):
```
kill -HUP `cat /var/run/inetd.pid`
```
If you have tcpd installed, write the following into /etc/hosts.deny:
```
leafnode: ALL
```
and into /etc/hosts.allow:
```
leafnode: 127.0.0.1
```
to protect your news server from abuse. If you want to make leafnode accessible to additional IP numbers/domains, add them in /etc/hosts.allow in the format described above. See hosts_access(5) and hosts_options(5) (if applicable) for more information about tcp wrappers.
Run fetchnews. The first run will take some time since fetchnews reads a list of all newsgroups from your upstream server. In the worst case, this can take up to 60 minutes, depending on how many newsgroups your provider offers and how reliable your modem connection is. To see fetchnews working, run it with -vvv.
Read news using an NNTP client (with $NNTPSERVER or /etc/nntpserver pointing to your own host). Select the groups you want to read in the future. You will find them empty except a default article. Reading this article is necessary with some newsreaders to select the groups for further fetching.
After this, you should have empty files in /var/spool/news/interesting.groups/ for every group you want to read.
Run fetchnews again. This run should pick up all the groups you want to read.

3. UPDATE FROM PREVIOUS VERSIONS

3.1 Update from versions < 2.0

From 1.9.x to 2.0 there were some changes to options in the main configuration file. The options "maxage", "maxlines", "minlines", "maxbytes" and "maxcrosspost" have become obsolete in the main configuration file and have to be specified in the filter file instead. The advantage of this is that you can do much finer selection on these criteria now.

To replace, for example, a "maxage = 5" specification in the main configuration file, you should add the following to your filter file:

newsgroups = *
maxage = 5
action = kill

The leafnode programs will issue warnings if they encounter obsolete specifications in the main config file.

3.2 Update from versions < 1.9.3

From version 1.9.3 on, the groupinfo file is sorted in a case-insensitive manner. To update correctly, do a "make update" as root after you have successfully completed "make install". This will re-sort the groupinfo file. The old groupinfo file will be stored as groupinfo.old just in case something goes wrong. You also have to change your main config file manually as described in the last section.

3.3 Update from versions < 1.6

Between leafnode-1.6alpha and leafnode-1.6, the format of the groupinfo file changed and some files moved to other places. To update correctly, do a "make update" as root after you have successfully completed "make install". This will reformat the groupinfo file and move the other files into the correct places. The old groupinfo file will be stored as groupinfo.old just in case something goes wrong. You also have to change your main config file manually as described in the section "Update from versions < 2.0".

4. FILES AND DIRECTORIES

Leafnode puts its files in three separate directories: The spool directory, the library directory, and the binaries directory. All directories can be changed at compile time.

In the spool directory you find the stored news, the active file and some other short-lived configuration file. It defaults to /var/spool/news and can be changed at compilation time. There are some special directories here; see the leafnode(8) man page.

The library directory contains long-lived configuration files. It defaults to /etc/leafnode.

The binaries directory, /usr/local/sbin by default, contains the executable programs applyfilter, texpire, fetchnews and leafnode.

The user directory, /usr/local/bin by default, contains the newsq program.

4.1. The main configuration file

4.2. The filter file

5. LOCAL NEWSGROUPS

From version 2.0 on, Leafnode is able to handle local newsgroups. Local newsgroups are groups that exist only on your local server but not on upstream servers.

To create a local newsgroup, you have to think of a newsgroup name which should not exist on any of your upstream servers. It is therefore a good idea to start a new top-level hierarchy. You should also make up a description for your newsgroup.

If you choose a newsgroup name which exists already on an upstream server, the newsgroup is not treated as a local one.

Next, you write both the name and description into the file /var/spool/news/leaf.node/local.groups using your preferred text editor. The file should consist of lines in the format

news.group.name description

The first word of each line is taken as the newsgroup name; the rest of the line is interpreted as description. For example, to set up a newsgroup "local.leafnode" which deals with Leafnode's internals, you would put a line

local.leafnode Local leafnode user group

into /var/spool/news/leaf.node/local.groups . (If your newsspool does not reside in /var/spool/news, replace this part of the pathname with the appropriate directory.)

That's it! You just have created a local newsgroup and can now access it using your newsreader of choice.

6. DEINSTALLATION

If you want to uninstall leafnode (e.g. because you want to replace it with another newsserver) and have a Makefile available, you can achieve this by doing "make uninstall". This will remove the executables, newsspool and configuration directories. If you only want to remove the executables and leave the spool and configuration directories untouched, use "make uninstall-bins" instead.

There is no need to uninstall an old version of leafnode before updating.

7. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

See the file FAQ.

8. COPYRIGHT

Major modifications were made by
Randolf Skerka <Randolf.Skerka@gmx.de>
Kent Robotti <robotti@erols.com>
Markus Enzenberger <enz@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de>
Matthias Andree <mandree@dosis.uni-dortmund.de>
Jörg Dietrich <joerg@dietrich.net>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.