Newsgroups

Newsgroups are difficult to implement correctly, in spite of the RedHat RPMs; they consist of several different parts, all of which must be working properly. When one part fails, the others will also all fail.

This documentation does not include instructions on how to connect to the Usenet; Wellesley College does have a newsfeed, but the scope of this project was not great enough to include connecting a Linux server to a newsfeed.

Part I

Make sure that INN is installed. The version on Ariel that came with RedHat 5.2 is INN 1.7.2, so that's what I have installed. It's available in an RPM if you haven't got it installed already. 

locate inn

should produce a spew of outputs including something in /etc/news. If it's not there, you need to install the INN RPM first. If you want to read the Installation instructions for INN, you need to This little step makes the Install.ms a legible thing - otherwise, you get to poor through lots of garbled control characters. Granted, it kills some of the formatting, but I couldn't find another way to read it.

If INN exists, su to root, and 

cd /etc/news

pico inn.conf

Your domain name should be your domain, in this case 
wellesley.edu

Your organization should be something. For Ariel, it's Dragon Mage Enterprises.
Your server should be 
localhost
. ariel.wellesley.edu also functioned for Ariel, sometimes. If localhost fails to produce results, change this to 
yourservername.wellesley.edu
where yourservername is the name of your computer.

Once inn.conf has been updated, INN is configured. It is now possible to make newsgroups. 

 ctlinnd newgroup foo.group
will create a new group called foo.group. Ariel's newsgroups were configured to be called ariel.[whatever], so that if a newsfeed was ever connected to her, she would not conflict with any existing groups on the Usenet. Do not call the groups foo.[group], as that is probably taken somewhere. 

cd /usr/lib/news/bin
and 
./makeactive

Output will be generated that should be copied via copy-pasted to /usr/lib/news/active. This generates an existing newsfile that newsreaders will then be able to read.

Part II

The next thing that needs to be installed, if it isn't already, is Inews. Install the Inews RPM, and Inews will work properly. Tin uses Inews to post messages to newsgroups.

Part III

The Tin RPM is one of the RPMs that preconfigured in such a way as to make it difficult to use. For this project, the latest version of Tin was downloaded from the Tin website at www.tin.org. Here are instructions on how to configure Tin without the RPM.

Back to the Table of Contents.
Created: April 5, 1999
Last updated: May 12, 1999