Chapter 29. News Servers

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Types of News Servers

• The INN Package and Configuration Files

• Installing the INN Package

• Configuring innd

• Reference

In the early days of the Internet, newsgroups were a hugely popular way of sharing information to a wide audience, and also helped early collaboration between developers and users. In fact, the existence of Linux was first announced to a newsgroup by Linus Torvalds back in 1994.

Nowadays, collaboration has moved onto websites with tools such as Wikis and web forums becoming more popular. However, there are still reasons why you would use newsgroups, or, to give it its proper title, network news. If you are responsible for providing information to a wide range of people, you might find that deploying your own local news server could be beneficial.

Although fairly mature in their development, news servers are typically complicated to configure. This chapter will give you information on how to get started and what common pitfalls to avoid.