C News should be available in a prepackaged format for any modern Linux
distribution, so installation will be easy. If not, or if you want to
install from the original source distribution, then of course you
can.[1] No matter how you install it, you will need to edit the C
News configuration files. Their formats are described in the following
list:
- sys
The sys file controls which newsgroups your site
receives and forwards. We discuss it in detail in the following
section.
- active
Not usually edited by the administration; contains directions for handling
articles in each newsgroup the site handles.
- organization
This file should contain your organization's name, for example,
“Virtual Brewery, Inc.” On your home machine, enter
“private site,” or anything else you like. Most people
will not consider your site properly configured if you haven't customized
this file.
- newsgroups
This file is a list of all newsgroups, with a one-line description of each
one's purpose. These descriptions are frequently used by your newsreader
when displaying the list of all groups to which you are subscribed.
- mailname
Your site's mail name, e.g., vbrew.com.
- whoami
Your site's name for news purposes. Quite often, the UUCP site name is used,
e.g., vbrew.
- explist
You should probably edit this file to reflect your preferred expiration times
for special newsgroups. Disk space may play an important role in your choices.
To create an initial hierarchy of newsgroups, obtain
active and newsgroups files
from the site that feeds you. Install them in /etc/news,
making sure they are owned by news and
have a mode of 644, using the chmod command. Remove all
to.* groups from the active file,
and add to.my-site,
to.feed-site,
junk, and
control. The
to.* groups are normally used for
exchanging ihave/sendme messages, but you should list them regardless of
whether you plan to use ihave/sendme or not. Next, replace all article
numbers in the second and third field of active using
the following commands:
# cp active active.old
# sed 's/ [0-9]* [0-9]* / 0000000000 00001 /' active.old > active
# rm active.old |
The second command invokes the sed stream
editor. This invocation replaces two strings of digits with a string of
zeroes and the string 000001, respectively.
Finally, create the news spool directory and the subdirectories used for
incoming and outgoing news:
# cd /var/spool
# mkdir news news/in.coming news/out.going news/out.master
# chown -R news.news news
# chmod -R 755 news |
If you're using precompiled newsreaders sourced from a different
distribution to the C News server you have running, you may find that
some expect the news spool in /usr/spool/news
rather than /var/spool/news. If your newsreader
doesn't seem to find any articles, create a symbolic link from
/usr/spool/news to
/var/spool/news like this:
# ln -sf /usr/spool/news /var/spool/news |
Now you are ready to receive news. Note that you don't have to create the
individual newsgroup spool directories. C News automatically creates
spool directories for any newsgroup it receives an article for, if one doesn't
already exist.
In particular, this happens to all groups to which an
article has been cross-posted. So, after a while, you will find your news spool
cluttered with directories for newsgroups you have never subscribed
to, like alt.lang.teco. You may
prevent this by either removing all unwanted groups from
active, or by regularly running a shell script that
removes all empty directories below /var/spool/news
(except out.going and in.coming,
of course).
C News needs a user to send error messages and status reports to. By
default, this is usenet. If you
use the default, you have to set up an alias for it that forwards all
of its mail to one or more responsible person. You may also override
this behavior by setting the environment variable NEWSMASTER to the appropriate name. You
have to do so in news's
crontab file, as well as every time you invoke an
administrative tool manually, so installing an alias is probably
easier. Mail aliases are described in Chapter 18, and Chapter 19.
While you're hacking /etc/passwd, make sure that every
user has her real name in the pw_gecos
field of the password file (this is the fourth field). It is a question of
Usenet netiquette that the sender's real name appears in the
From: field of the article. Of course, you will want to
do so anyway when you use mail.
