On 2025-07-26, Borax Man <[email protected]> wrote:

I set up some years ago an INN server for private use. It worked for years almost without issue however I've run into a program that has appeared for seemingly no reason.

The server I set up is for me and friends, and does not peer with any other server.

The issue I've found, which I'm asking for help troubleshooting, is that submitted posts are not appearing. They are being held in /var/spool/news/incoming

I posted the message too early. To clarify, I can see files in /var/spool/news/incoming, which are the posted messages waiting to be processed. What I'd like help with, is troubleshooting why these are
just sitting there, and not actually being processed and posted!

The inn2 service is running...

inn2.service - InterNetNews
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/inn2.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sat 2025-07-26 10:56:36 AEST; 47min ago
Docs: man:innd(8)
Main PID: 979 (innd)
Status: "Server running. Readers follow enabled."
Tasks: 4 (limit: 991)
CPU: 8.032s
CGroup: /system.slice/inn2.service
├─ 979 /usr/lib/news/bin/innd -f
├─ 997 /bin/sh /usr/lib/news/bin/innwatch -i 60
├─1013 controlchan
└─4540 sleep 600

Jul 26 11:34:33 raspberrypi nnrpd[4514]: localhost group general 3
Jul 26 11:34:33 raspberrypi nnrpd[4514]: localhost exit articles 7 groups 4
Jul 26 11:34:33 raspberrypi nnrpd[4514]: localhost times user 0.158 system 0.315 idle 0.035 elapsed 26.250
Jul 26 11:34:33 raspberrypi nnrpd[4514]: localhost artstats get 7 time 0 size 12419
Jul 26 11:34:33 raspberrypi nnrpd[4514]: localhost overstats count 4 hit 608 miss 0 time 0 size 260103 dbz 0 seek 0 get 0 artcheck 48
Jul 26 11:34:33 raspberrypi nnrpd[4514]: DIGEST-MD5 common mech free
Jul 26 11:34:33 raspberrypi nnrpd[4514]: localhost time 26260 idle 25333(25) readart 13(7) nntpwrite 568(740)
Jul 26 11:36:37 raspberrypi innd[979]: ME status seconds 0 accepted 0 refused 0 rejected 0 duplicate 0 accepted size 1 duplicate size 0 rejected size 0
Jul 26 11:36:37 raspberrypi innd[979]: ME time 600575 hissync 0(2) idle 600538(6) nntpread 0(2) datamove 0(1)
Jul 26 11:36:37 raspberrypi innd[979]: ME HISstats 0 hitpos 0 hitneg 0 missed 0 dne

And the output of /var/log/news/inn.status

INN 2.6.4
pid 979 started Sat Jul 26 10:56:36 2025

Updated: Sat Jul 26 11:36:37 2025
(peers: 0, active-cxns: 0, sleeping-cxns: 0)

Mode: running

Configuration file: /etc/news/inn.conf

Global configuration parameters:
Largest Article: 0 bytes
Max Incoming connections: 50
Max Outgoing file feeds: 1010
Cutoff: 1000 days
Timeout period: 300 seconds
Remember Trash: Yes
Perl filtering: enabled

global (process)
seconds: 0
offered: 0
accepted: 0 %accepted: 0.0%
refused: 0 %refused: 0.0%
rejected: 0 %rejected: 0.0%
duplicated: 0 %duplicated: 0.0%
bytes: 0.0kb
duplicated size: 0.0kb %duplicated size: 0.0%
rejected size: 0.0kb %rejected size: 0.0%


The contents of the "/var/spool/news/incoming" directory are...
total 32
-rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 588 Jul 26 11:28 4ktDYl
drwxrwxr-x 2 news news 4096 Oct 6 2019 bad
-rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 746 Jul 26 10:51 evZN9a
-rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 588 Jul 26 10:57 mMIhek
-rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 590 Jul 26 10:52 O4vlB8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 728 Jul 26 11:33 r2uGnV
drwxrwxr-x 2 news news 4096 Jul 26 11:11 tmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 news news 746 Jul 26 10:51 ZP9zqb

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I set up some years ago an INN server for private use. It worked for years almost without issue however I've run into a program that has appeared for seemingly no reason.

The server I set up is for me and friends, and does not peer with any other server.

The issue I've found, which I'm asking for help troubleshooting, is that submitted posts are not appearing. They are being held in /var/spool/news/incoming

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I posted the message too early. To clarify, I can see files in /var/spool/news/incoming, which are the posted messages waiting to be processed.

Did you set "spoolfirst" in inn.conf or readers.conf?

spoolfirst
If true, nnrpd(8) will spool new articles rather than attempting to send
them to innd(8). If false, nnrpd will spool articles only if it receives
an error trying to send them to innd. Setting this to true can be useful
if nnrpd must respond as fast as possible to the client; however, when
set, articles will not appear to readers until they are given to innd.
nnrpd won't do this; "rnews -U" must be run periodically to take the
spooled articles and post them. This is a boolean value and the default
is false.

There should be a cron job to process posts every hour:

# Every hour, run an rnews -U. This is not only for UUCP sites, but
# also to process queud up articles put there by nnrpd in case
# innd wasn't accepting any articles.
10 * * * * news [ -x /usr/bin/rnews ] && rnews -U

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2025-07-26, Nomen Nescio <[email protected]> wrote:

I posted the message too early. To clarify, I can see files in
/var/spool/news/incoming, which are the posted messages waiting to be
processed.

Did you set "spoolfirst" in inn.conf or readers.conf?

spoolfirst
If true, nnrpd(8) will spool new articles rather than attempting to send
them to innd(8). If false, nnrpd will spool articles only if it receives
an error trying to send them to innd. Setting this to true can be useful
if nnrpd must respond as fast as possible to the client; however, when
set, articles will not appear to readers until they are given to innd.
nnrpd won't do this; "rnews -U" must be run periodically to take the
spooled articles and post them. This is a boolean value and the default
is false.

spoolfirst is set to false

spoolfirst: false

There should be a cron job to process posts every hour:

# Every hour, run an rnews -U. This is not only for UUCP sites, but
# also to process queud up articles put there by nnrpd in case
# innd wasn't accepting any articles.
10 * * * * news [ -x /usr/bin/rnews ] && rnews -U

The posts have now appeared, and I didn't do anything other then restart
the service a few times.

At the moment, the posts are going through. Why they weren't before,
I'm not sure, but I changed nothing with regards to configuration.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 2025-07-27, Borax Man <[email protected]> wrote:

On 2025-07-26, Nomen Nescio <[email protected]> wrote:

I posted the message too early. To clarify, I can see files in
/var/spool/news/incoming, which are the posted messages waiting to be
processed.

Did you set "spoolfirst" in inn.conf or readers.conf?

spoolfirst
If true, nnrpd(8) will spool new articles rather than attempting to send >> them to innd(8). If false, nnrpd will spool articles only if it receives >> an error trying to send them to innd. Setting this to true can be useful >> if nnrpd must respond as fast as possible to the client; however, when
set, articles will not appear to readers until they are given to innd.
nnrpd won't do this; "rnews -U" must be run periodically to take the
spooled articles and post them. This is a boolean value and the default
is false.

spoolfirst is set to false

spoolfirst: false

There should be a cron job to process posts every hour:

# Every hour, run an rnews -U. This is not only for UUCP sites, but
# also to process queud up articles put there by nnrpd in case
# innd wasn't accepting any articles.
10 * * * * news [ -x /usr/bin/rnews ] && rnews -U

The posts have now appeared, and I didn't do anything other then restart
the service a few times.

At the moment, the posts are going through. Why they weren't before,
I'm not sure, but I changed nothing with regards to configuration.

The posts have stopped going through now. I've restarted the machine, nothing.

They just sit in "incoming".

Also, manually running /usr/bin/rnews -U does not work.

What I'd like help on, if possible, is troubleshooting, or at least understanding WHY inn2 is not posting.

By the way, I am running nnrpd, and it seems it could be an issue with nnrpd passing articles to inn2.

nnrpd is started with the following systemd service file.

[Unit]
Description=InterNetNews NNRPD
Documentation=man:innd(8)
After=inn2.service
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=forking
Restart=on-abort
ExecStart=/usr/lib/news/bin/nnrpd -D -S -p 563
User=news
Group=news
ConfigurationDirectory=news
LogsDirectory=news
LogsDirectoryMode=775
RuntimeDirectory=news
StateDirectory=news
StateDirectoryMode=775
ReadWritePaths=/var/spool/news/
ProtectSystem=full
ProtectControlGroups=yes
ProtectHome=yes
LimitNOFILE=infinity

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)