|
|
4. Setting up CNews + NNTPd4.1. Getting the sources and stuff4.1.1. The sourcesC-News software can be obtained from ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/transport/cnews/cnews.tar.Z and will need to be uncompressed using the BSD uncompress utility or a compatible program. The tarball is about 650 KBytes in size. It has its own highly intelligent configuration and installation processes, which are very well documented. The version that is available is Cleanup Release revision G, on which our own version is based. NNTPd (the NNTP Reference Implementation) is available from ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/nntp/nntp.1.5.12.1.tar.Z. It has no automatic scripts and processes to configure itself. After fetching the sources, you will have to follow a set of directions given in the documentation and configure some C header files. These configuration settings must be done keeping in mind what you have specified when you build the C-News sources, because NNTPd and C-News must work together. Therefore, some key file formats, directory paths, etc., will have to be specified identically in both software systems. The third software system we use is Nestor. This too is to be found in the same place where the NNTPd software is kept, at ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/nntp/nestor.tar.Z. This software compiles to one binary program, which must be run periodically to process the logs of nntpd, the NNTP server which is part of NNTPd, and report usage statistics to the administrator. We have integrated Nestor into our source base. The fourth piece of the system, without which no Usenet server administrator dares venture out into the wild world of public Internet newsfeeds, is pgpverify. We have been working with C-News and NNTPd for many years now, and have fixed a few bugs in both packages. We have also integrated the four software systems listed above, and added a few features here and there to make things work more smoothly. We offer our entire source base to anyone for free download from http://www.starcomsoftware.com/proj/usenet/src/news.tar.gz. There are no licensing restrictions on our sources; they are as freely redistributable as the original components we started with. When you download our software distribution, you will extract it to find a directory tree with the following subdirectories and files:
Needless to say, we believe that our source tree is a better place to start with than the original components, specially if you are installing a Usenet server on a Linux box and for the first time. We will be available on email to provide technical assistance should you run into trouble. 4.1.2. The key configuration filesOnce you get the sources, you will need some key configuration files to seed your C-News system. These configuration files are actually database tables, and are changing frequently, whenever newsgroups are created, modified or deleted. These files specify the list of active newsgroups in the ``public'' Usenet. You can, and should, add your organisation's internal newsgroups to this list when you set up your own server, but you will need to know the list of public standard newsgroups to begin with. This list can be obtained from the same FTP server by downloading the files active.gz and newsgroups.gz from ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/config/. You can create your own active and newsgroups |
