[continued from previous message]
what's going on with an outgoing feed, you can switch it from innfeed
to nntpsend (see INSTALL for instructions). You can then run it
manually with innxmit -dv, which will show the full conversation with
your remote peer.
------------------------------
Subject: 3.8. sendmail isn't installed
Yes, INN really does require sendmail. It uses sendmail to send out the
daily reports and to mail messages to moderators, and it assumes that you
have a program installed as /usr/sbin/sendmail or /usr/lib/sendmail that
it can use to do this. It does not speak SMTP, nor is it likely to ever
speak SMTP; it's hard enough maintaining a package to speak NNTP.
If you need a very simple local sendmail implementation that just sends
mail to a smarthost, there are several available (nullmailer, for
example).
------------------------------
Subject: 4. Error Messages
Explanations of specific error messages, including solutions where
applicable.
INN logs nearly all messages to syslog, so in general these error messages
will be found in syslog. If you aren't seeing anything from INN in syslog
at all, make sure that you have it set up correctly (see 3.3).
------------------------------
Subject: 4.1. innd: SERVER cant store article
You probably have a misconfigured storage.conf. In current versions of
INN, "no matching entry in storage.conf" is added to the end of this
message unless it really is a disk I/O problem, making the cause
considerably clearer.
storage.conf(5) has this to say:
If an article doesn't match any entry, either by being posted to a
newsgroup that doesn't match any of the <wildmat> patterns or by being
outside the size and expires ranges of all entries whose newsgroups
pattern it does match, the article is not stored and is rejected by
innd(8). When this happens, the error message
cant store article: no matching entry in storage.conf
is logged to syslog. If you want to silently drop articles matching
certain newsgroup patterns or size or expires ranges, assign them to the
"trash" storage method rather than having them not match any storage
method entry.
One of the more frequent causes of this problem is misuse of the expires
key in storage.conf entries. Read the man page for storage.conf very
carefully if you're using the expires key, since it may not do what you
think it does. In particular, if you have a storage class that specifies expires with a min-time greater than 0, it won't match any article without
an Expires header (the vast majority of Usenet articles).
------------------------------
Subject: 4.2. innd: SERVER internal no control and/or junk group
Your active file isn't complete. Either it's been mangled by something or
it's missing some required entries. Even if you're running a small
stand-alone server for internal use that only carries a handful of groups, there are some pseudogroups used internally by INN that you have to have.
Since INN isn't running (it won't start when this error occurs), you can
edit the active file by hand without worrying about stepping on INN's
toes. Make sure the following lines are present in the active file (if
the numbers are different, that's fine):
control 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.cancel 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.checkgroups 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.newgroup 0000000000 0000000000 n
control.rmgroup 0000000000 0000000000 n
junk 0000000000 0000000000 n
and then start INN again. The control* groups are for control messages (messages with a named group will be filed into it, and all other control messages will go into the top-level catch-all group). The n flag is so
that users won't post messages directly to the control* groups; control messages should be posted to the groups that they affect instead and INN
will refile them automatically based on the Control header.
If you have mergetogroups: set in inn.conf, you will also need to create
a newsgroup named "to". Otherwise, you will get the following error:
innd: SERVER internal no to group
------------------------------
Subject: 4.3. Modification of read-only value attempted (Cleanfeed)
INN 2.3 and later have an internal optimization to the interface to
embedded filters that makes filtering about 15-20% faster, but which
disallows a trick that many versions of Cleanfeed use to count the number
of lines in the article. (This problem is fixed in current versions of Cleanfeed.)
To correct this problem, find the line in Cleanfeed that looks like:
$lines = $hdr{'__BODY__'} =~ tr/\n/\n/;
and change it to:
$lines = $hdr{'__LINES__'};
The __LINES__ hash value is set internally by all recent versions of INN
and is guaranteed to be correct.
------------------------------
Subject: 4.4. tradspool: could not open ... File exists
This error generally happens after a crash or unclean shutdown of innd
using the tradspool storage method, and is caused by overview information
being out of sync with what articles are in the spool. When innd was restarted, it renumbered its active file (which determines the range of existing articles in each group and therefore what article number is
assigned to new articles) based on the overview information. If there are newer articles already on disk that aren't mentioned in the overview
(because the overview information for those articles hasn't been flushed
to disk yet), new incoming articles will get assigned the same number as
the existing article and then innd will fail to store the article and
throttle with this error.
In INN 2.4 and later when using the tradindexed overview method, you can
solve this problem by rebuilding the overview for any affected group.
Throttle the server (if it isn't already) and then run:
tdx-util -R <path-to-articles> -n <newsgroup>
where <newsgroup> is the newsgroup that INN is complaining about and <path-to-particles> is the full path to the directory where the articles
for that group are stored (it's generally in the error message).
Immediately afterwards, run ctlinnd renumber for that newsgroup, and then unthrottle the server.
The general solution to this problem, which works with any version of INN
and any overview method, is to shut down the server, delete all of your overview database, and then rebuild it from your news spool with:
makehistory -O -x -F
This takes a long time and is to some degree overkill. For versions of
INN prior to 2.5, you will also need to run ctlinnd renumber '' immediately after restarting INN.
A third and better solution in some cases is to just remove all articles
in the spool that have higher numbers than the numbers in the active file. Here's a Perl script that will do that. Just save this to a file, make it executable, and run it, giving it the path to the active file as the first argument and the path to the top of your tradspool news spool as the
second argument:
#!/usr/bin/perl
die "Usage: <name> <active> <spool-path>\n" unless @ARGV == 2;
open (ACTIVE, $ARGV[0]) or die "Can't open $ARGV[0]: $!\n";
while (<ACTIVE>) {
my ($group, $hi, $lo, $flag) = split;
my $directory = $group;
next if ($hi == 0 and $lo <= 1);
$directory =~ tr%.%/%;
$directory = $ARGV[1] . '/' . $directory;
if (-d $directory) {
opendir (DIR, $directory) or die "Can't open $directory: $!\n";
while (defined ($_ = readdir DIR)) {
unlink "$directory/$_" if ($_ > $hi);
}
closedir DIR;
}
}
If you're not already running INN 2.4, upgrade if you can. Not only can
you recover directly from this problem if you're using tradindexed
overview, but INN 2.4 does a better job of flushing data to disk and is
less likely to have this problem in the first place.
------------------------------
Subject: 4.5. Binary posting to non-binary group
This message does not actually come from INN. It's generated by
Cleanfeed, and if you're seeing it, that means that you have Cleanfeed installed. At least at one point, the default Red Hat installation of INN included Cleanfeed without documenting this particularly well.
In order to allow binaries in your local hierarchies, you should modify
the Cleanfeed configuration file to set bin_allowed to a regular
expression matching the groups that should allow binaries. Please don't
allow binary postings to regular Usenet newsgroups that you don't know
should have binaries, as they consume large amounts of bandwidth and
possibly disk space for other sites.
For more information on Cleanfeed configuration options, see the Cleanfeed documentation and the comments in the default configuration file.
------------------------------
Subject: 5. Problems on Specific Systems
Problems specific to particular operating systems or platforms. Look here
if INN doens't behave as expected on your particular system, or if you're having trouble compiling INN in the first place.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.1. INN won't compile on SCO OpenServer
On SCO OpenServer, the default cc requires -O be given when -Kalloca is
given (which is added by default by configure since the parsers generated
by bison need it). However, there appears to be a bug in the compiler
that causes it to miscompile nnrpd/commands.c under -O, generating the
error:
Assembler: commands.c
aline 1505 : Syntax error
I had to get around this by cd'ing into nnrpd, running:
make COPT=-g commands.o
and then cd'ing back to the top level and running make again. On
OpenServer, to build with cc, you have to use:
env CC=cc CFLAGS=-O ./configure --with-sendmail=/usr/lib/sendmail
Building under gcc is cleaner, but of course if you want to use
--with-perl you want to build with the same compiler that you built Perl
with.
It's also worth noting that with a shared Perl library, Perl on this
platform doesn't apparently generate the right link magic to include the
path to the dynamic Perl libraries. You need to either set LD_RUN_PATH
before building or LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running any binaries so that
they can find the Perl libraries. (The former is preferred, since then
the path is encoded into the binaries and you don't have to remember to
set LD_LIBRARY_PATH later.)
------------------------------
Subject: 5.2. Using raw devices on Solaris destroys the partition table
If you use slice 2, or some other disk slice that includes the entire
disk, under Solaris as a raw partition for CNFS, you may run into this
problem. The symptoms are that INN manages to initialize the cycbuffs
just fine, but then gets invalid device errors when it tries to open them again, and the disks show up in format as needing to be repartitioned.
The solution is to not use raw devices that include the first cylinder of
the disk. Solaris doesn't protect the superblock from being overwritten
by an application writing to raw devices and includes it in the first
cylinder of the disk, so unless you use a slice that starts with cylinder
1 instead of 0, INN will invalidate the partition table when it tries to initialize the cycbuff and all further accesses will fail until you repartition.
Generally all that has to be done is to repartition the disk with slice 0 starting from cylinder 1 and extending to the end of the disk and then
point INN at slice 0 instead of slice 2. You lose some small amount of
space, but generally not enough to care about.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.3. Will INN work on Windows?
It won't out of the box. The standard INN distribution doesn't build on Windows. It has, however, been built for Cygwin (a Unix-like environment
for Windows) in the past and some of the necessary patches (although
perhaps not all of them) have been incorporated into current INN releases.
Search for
http://homepage.mac.com/imeowbot/inn/ at
<
http://web.archive.org/> for the previous work. Don't forget to peruse INSTALL if you download and want to try this.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.4. Why aren't INN's files where the documentation says they are?
INN's default installation locations are intended to be convenient for sysadmins adding INN to their system without disturbing other software.
They don't match any of the standards used by various Linux distributions
or other Unix packaging systems. Because of that, distributors who supply
INN packages often rearrange the files and directories.
Unfortunately, this is very confusing for system administrators, because
the documentation is not updated to reflect the modified locations of
files.
You can always get the details of how your system is configured by looking
in inn.conf at "pathnews" and similar parameters. But for convenience,
here are comparisons of INN's default locations with some of the most
common packages.
(Data courtesy of John F. Morse.)
DEFAULT DEBIAN
pathnews: /usr/local/news /usr/lib/news
pathbin: /usr/local/news/bin /usr/lib/news/bin
pathcontrol: /usr/local/news/bin/control /usr/lib/news/bin/control pathdb: /usr/local/news/db /var/lib/news
pathetc: /usr/local/news/etc /etc/news
pathfilter: /usr/local/news/bin/filter /etc/news/filter
pathhttp: /usr/local/news/http /var/www/inn
pathlog: /usr/local/news/log /var/log/news
pathrun: /usr/local/news/run /run/news
pathtmp: /usr/local/news/tmp /var/spool/news/incoming/tmp pathspool: /usr/local/news/spool /var/spool/news
patharchive: /usr/local/news/spool/archive /var/spool/news/archive patharticles: /usr/local/news/spool/articles /var/spool/news/articles pathincoming: /usr/local/news/spool/incoming /var/spool/news/incoming pathoutgoing: /usr/local/news/spool/outgoing /var/spool/news/outgoing pathoverview: /usr/local/news/spool/overview /var/spool/news/overview
DEFAULT FEDORA
pathnews: /usr/local/news /usr/libexec/news
pathbin: /usr/local/news/bin /usr/libexec/news
pathcontrol: /usr/local/news/bin/control /usr/libexec/news/control pathdb: /usr/local/news/db /var/lib/news
pathetc: /usr/local/news/etc /etc/news
pathfilter: /usr/local/news/bin/filter /usr/libexec/news/filter pathhttp: /usr/local/news/http /var/lib/news/http
pathlog: /usr/local/news/log /var/log/news
pathrun: /usr/local/news/run /run/news
pathtmp: /usr/local/news/tmp /var/lib/news/tmp
pathspool: /usr/local/news/spool /var/spool/news
patharchive: /usr/local/news/spool/archive /var/spool/news/archive patharticles: /usr/local/news/spool/articles /var/spool/news/articles pathincoming: /usr/local/news/spool/incoming /var/spool/news/incoming pathoutgoing: /usr/local/news/spool/outgoing /var/spool/news/outgoing pathoverview: /usr/local/news/spool/overview /var/spool/news/overview
In addition, the FreeBSD port uses the standard INN paths except that it
puts logs in /var/log/news and pathtmp in /usr/local/news/spool/tmp.
Most packages install INN's man pages into a system man directory (/usr/share/man or /usr/local/man) rather than into a separate man
directory under news's home directory.
------------------------------
Subject: 5.5. Running INN on macOS
Richard Tobin provided the following advice in news.software.nntp on
2013-06-29 based on experience with running INN on Snow Leopard:
Mac OS X, at least through the GUI, won't let you create a group with
the same name as a user. So you can't use "news" for both.
The Perl module GD isn't installed by default. GPG is not installed
by default.
You probably want to turn off Spotlight for the news spool directory.
Configure didn't get the Perl compile flags right. PERL_CPPFLAGS had
"-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc", but on this x86_64 machine the
files for the other architectures don't seem to be installed. I
edited Makefile.global by hand to remove them.
I needed to tell the application firewall to allow innd to accept
incoming connections. (A window pops up to ask you, but this doesn't
help when you're connected by ssh!)
When I ran rc.news form a terminal window, it stopped working when I
logged out. This is because of MacOS's convoluted and undocumented
way of doing DNS lookups. Using "nohup" fixed it -- not because of
anything to do with SIGHUP, but because nohup calls an undocumented
function related to "vprocmgr". Running from launchd shouldn't have
this problem, and it appears to be fixed in Mountain Lion.
The Perl flags come from the Perl configuration; this problem is fixed
with current builds of macOS.
------------------------------
Subject: 6. How Do I...
This section documents various common or uncommon tasks or configurations
that people want to do with INN. It is mostly taken from frequently asked questions in news.software.nntp.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.1. Set up a server with no external feeds, just local groups
The basic steps are to set up a newsfeeds file empty except for internal
feeds like controlchan or overchan (if you're using either), have only localhost in incoming.conf, and start INN with the default minimal active
file. Then, create the groups you want to carry with ctlinnd newgroup.
Set up reading permissions using readers.conf as appropriate for your organization.
In other words, it's very much like setting up any other instance of INN,
but you don't bother with innfeed, nntpsend, or any of their configuration files. INN may also complain that you have no feeds in newsfeeds; this is harmless and can be ignored.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.2. Process a single control message
To process a single control message, you can use controlchan from the
command line. Just type either:
echo /path/to/article-file | controlchan
or:
echo @token@ | controlchan
if you have the storage API token of the article. (This assumes
controlchan is in a directory in your path.) This is useful mostly for testing; if you just want to create, remove, or change a group, it's
easier to use ctlinnd (newgroup, rmgroup, or changegroup).
------------------------------
Subject: 6.4. Feed all articles on a server to another server
To feed all articles on an existing server to another one, regardless of
how they're stored on the server, first tell the new server to accept
articles regardless of how old they are (otherwise, INN will reject
articles older than artcutoff in inn.conf) and disable your filtering:
ctlinnd param c 0
ctlinnd perl n
ctlinnd python n
Note that rejected articles are remembered during the number of days
specified by the /remember/ line in expire.ctl; so, in case you forgot
to change the above parameters, you'll have to wait that number of
days before being able to inject them again. You can of course set
/remember/ to 0, run the expire process (for instance via news.daily),
undo the change in expire.ctl and then start the feed again.
You may also want to set xrefslave to true in inn.conf and then restart
INN on the new server if you want to keep the same article numbers as you
had on the old server. (It is notably helpful for news clients because
they otherwise get confused by an article renumbering in newsgroups they
are subscribed to.)
Next, make sure that the old server is listed in incoming.conf of the new server, and reload incoming.conf with ctlinnd to pick up that change.
Also make sure that the new server carries exactly the same set of
newsgroups as the old server.
You may also want the new server not to propagate the articles it will
receive during this feeding operation, by checking that the newsfeeds
file of the new server is not configured to propagate articles to other
peers or controlchan (otherwise old control articles may be reprocessed).
Then try these commands (a variation on commands posted by Katsuhiro
Kondou to inn-workers) on the old server:
cd <pathdb in inn.conf>
perl -ne 'chomp; our ($hash, $timestamps, $_) = split " "; \
print "$_\n" if $_' history \
| tr . / > <pathoutgoing in inn.conf>/list
innxmit server list
where <pathdb> is the path to the directory containing the history file (usually ~news/db), <pathoutgoing> is the path to the outgoing spool
directory (usually ~news/spool/outgoing), and server is the name of the
new news server to which you're feeding the articles.
In case you wish to only feed articles arrived on the old server
between two dates, you can adapt the previous commands. For instance,
the following commands will feed articles arrived between two given
timestamps (that can be computed with the convdate utility shipped
with INN).
convdate -n '15 Apr 2014 20:42 +0200' '16 Apr 2014 12:37 +0200'
returns the two corresponding timestamps 1397586540 and 1397644620 that
can then be used to retrieve a subset of articles to feed:
cd <pathdb in inn.conf>
perl -ne 'chomp; our ($hash, $timestamps, $_) = split " "; \
my ($arrived, $expires, $posted) = split("~", $timestamps); \
print "$_\n" if $_ and $arrived >= 1397586540 \
and $arrived <= 1397644620' history \
| tr . / > <pathoutgoing in inn.conf>/list
innxmit server list
If innxmit stops transferring articles (with for instance an error like "rewriting batch file and exiting"), just re-execute it.
When done, set xrefslave to false in inn.conf again if you changed it and
then either restart INN on the new server (necessary if you changed
xrefslave) or use another ctlinnd param command to set the cutoff value
back to what's specified in inn.conf and use ctlinnd perl and ctlinnd
python to reactivate your filters.
Please note that when using xrefslave, this method requires that all of
the articles in your spool have Xref headers. Current versions of INN
will always add an Xref header, but very old versions (earlier 1.x
versions) will only add an Xref header to crossposted articles. If you're trying to import such a spool, you'll need to modify all of those articles
to add an Xref header.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.5. Rename a newsgroup
INN has no native support for renaming a newsgroup, and doing so is
difficult, so the best advice is to not do this. If there's a way that
you can just create the new newsgroup, encourage people to start using it,
and then remove the old newsgroup, I recommend that. It's much easier.
Although it is not a renaming, it is also possible to create an alias.
Articles cannot be posted to that newsgroup, but they can be received
from other sites and treated as if they were actually posted to the
group named after the equal sign. However, their Newsgroups: header
is not modified.
ctlinnd newgroup group.to.file.under y
ctlinnd changegroup old.group =group.to.file.under
Creating an alias newsgroup is useful in case you want residual articles received under the old newsgroup name to be filed into the new group.
As for a renaming, if it really must be done, it's best if you're using the tradspool storage method. The newsgroup of an article is stored in the Newsgroups header and Xref header of the article as stored on disk (and possibly in Followup-To), as well as determining where the overview
information is stored, and in the case of tradspool is also encoded in the article's storage token. To rename a newsgroup in tradspool, stop the
server, move the directory containing all of the articles to its
appropriate new location in the news spool, edit every article to change
the old name to the new name in Newsgroups, Followup-To, and Xref, create
the new newsgroup with ctlinnd newgroup, and then rebuild history and
overview with makehistory.
The following bit of Perl may help with the renaming (from Jeffrey
Vinocur):
#!/usr/bin/perl -wi
my ($src, $dst) = (shift, shift);
die "Usage: $0 oldgroup newgroup [file1 [file2 ...]]\n"
unless(defined $dst);
while(<>) {
s/$src/$dst/g if 1 .. /^$/ and /^(Newsgroups|Followup-To|Xref):/i;
print;
} continue {
close ARGV if eof;
}
Note that this may cause some problems if the newsgroup you're renaming is contained in the name of another newsgroup to which messages in that group
are crossposted. If that's a problem, you may have to use a more
sophisticated script.
If any articles were crossposted to other newsgroups, you'll also have to
find and recreate the links in those newsgroups to the new location of the articles (if the links were hard links and the process of changing the
Xref, Followup-To, Newsgroups headers didn't break those links, you may be lucky and be able to skip this).
If you're using another storage method, this is harder, although with
timehash you may be able to just change the Newsgroups, Xref, Followup-To headers of the articles in that newsgroup and then rebuild history and
overview as above.
One other approach that can be used regardless of storage method is to
refeed the articles to the server into a new newsgroup. This approach
works best if you're also changing news servers at the same time;
otherwise, the message IDs of the articles will already be in history, and you'll have to change the message IDs of all of the messages or remove
them from the history database (such as by moving the articles away,
changing /remember/ to 0 so that old history entries won't be retained,
and then running expire to purge them out of history). To do this, get
all of the messages into a directory (by pulling them down via NNTP or
some other method), change the Newsgroups, Xref, and Followup-To headers
to rename the newsgroup, and then create a file containing paths to all of
the articles, one per line. You can then use that file as input to
innxmit, pointing it at the server to which to feed the articles, and if
the articles aren't listed in history on that server and it carries the
new group, they will be accepted into the new newsgroup.
Note that if you use this method and something goes wrong the first time,
the message IDs will probably have all been added to history on the new
server and the articles now will never be accepted until those entries are removed from history again (or all the message IDs changed).
------------------------------
Subject: 6.6. Change the domain used for message IDs
By default, any message IDs generated by INN will use the domain of the
local system for the right-hand-side of the message ID. In some cases,
this isn't desirable for various reasons (the server may have an internal
name that doesn't make sense on Usenet at large, or one may not want to
expose the name of the server).
In INN 2.3.3 and later, you can set virtualhost: to true in an access
stanza of readers.conf and then set domain: in the same stanza, and all
posts coming from connections to which that access stanza applies will use
that domain to generate message IDs. So if you need to change the domain
used to generate message IDs for every local post from your server, just
add virtualhost: and domain: keys to every access stanza in readers.conf.
This is really overkill for this option, and eventually the domain:
parameter in inn.conf will probably be changed to allow this to be
modified for the whole server. (Right now, domain: in inn.conf means
something completely different.)
------------------------------
Subject: 6.7. Use INN without a direct news feed
INN is designed to be used as a regular news server, receiving direct news feeds from other news servers and sending news directly to other news
servers using the peer-to-peer portions of the NNTP protocol. However,
with some additional software, it is also possible to use INN as, in
essence, a local cache for a news server that you can use to read and post
but which doesn't treat your server like a peer.
This configuration is generally called a "suck" feed, because rather than having news fed directly to your server, you pull it down or "suck" it
from another news server, and because possibly the first and one of the
most widely used packages for doing this is named suck.
The software to pull down articles from another server and to feed
articles to another server using post rather than peer-to-peer commands
does not come with INN (INN has a few utilities to do this on a small
scale, but not really anything designed to handle a lot of groups or a lot
of articles). You will need an external package to do this. The two most popular are suck and newsx; however, both sites appear to be unavailable
as of thos writing. You may be able to find a package in your local distribution or package repository.
Note that current versions of INN refer to articles internally using a
storage API token, not a path name, which is not always what suck or newsx expects. Read the documentation carefully; you'll need to use a script or configuration that retrieves articles using the sm program that comes with
INN rather than trying to open files directly.
It's also worth noting that INN is a fairly complex package, and while
many people are running it successfully using this sort of configuration
and like having a full-fledged news server available to them, other people
have found INN rather complicated and difficult to configure for a small, simple personal news cache. If your needs and goals are simple and the
number of groups you're interested in is small, you may be better off with
a smaller, lighter package such as LeafNode or NNTPcache.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.8. Generate MRTG graphs for INN
INN's CNFS storage system has direct support for producing information
suitable for MRTG graphs on the usage of the CNFS cycbuffs. Running
cnfsstat -m <cycbuf> will generate output suitable for MRTG, and running cnfsstat -p will generate sample MRTG configuration fragments for each
cycbuff.
To generate MRTG graphs of the usage of the buffindexed overview system,
try the following configuration fragment:
Target[overview-BUFF]: `/usr/local/etc/mrtg/overview.sh`
MaxBytes[overview-BUFF]: 100
Title[overview-BUFF]: BUFF1 Usage
Options[overview-BUFF]: growright gauge
YLegend[overview-BUFF]: Overview Buffers
ShortLegend[overview-BUFF]: %
PageTop[overview-BUFF]: <H1>Usage of Overview Buffers</H1>
<BR><TT>overview</TT>
where the overview.sh script is:
#!/bin/sh
echo "100"
<pathbin in inn.conf>/inndf -o | awk '{print $1}'
echo "0"
echo "overview"
This sample configuration is from Basil Kruglov. Note that you can
instead use -n (for total count of articles); in that case, you'll want to remove the MaxBytes setting above or change it to be some sensible limit
on the total number of articles you receive. You'll also want to change a
few of the other labels in the MRTG configuration.
I'm not aware of any packaged solutions for generating MRTG data from
other things, such as incoming or outcoming news flows. If anyone has any pointers, let me know.
------------------------------
Subject: 6.9. Hide the junk and control groups from users
The junk, control, and control.cancel groups must exist in the active file
for the proper operation of INN, so you can't remove the groups entirely.
You can, however, hide them completely from users.
To do this, edit readers.conf, and for each user access group where you
want to hide the junk and control groups, add "!junk,!control,!control.*"
to the newsgroups pattern. In other words, if you have a line like:
newsgroups: *
just change that to:
newsgroups: *,!junk,!control,!control.*
If you use read and post patterns instead, do the same for each of them
[continued in next message]
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