Using LeafnodeINN is a tool that's used mainly by large ISPs or other organizations that want to provide full news feeds, or by organizations that want to provide limited local newsgroups in support of their own activities, but not full news feeds. As described earlier, though, in the section "When to Run a News Server," some people want to run local news servers in order to facilitate their own local news reading. Such a server should retrieve messages from just a few newsgroups, make them available whether or not the main Internet connection is active, and upload the user 's postings during the next round of message downloads. These scheduled message exchanges could take place just once or twice a day, at times when the news server is not heavily loaded or when a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) dialup connection is inexpensive or easy to obtain. In principle, INN could serve this function, but considered as a server for just a few local users reading a handful of newsgroups, INN is overkill. The program is also designed to work as a peer on the Usenet network, so chances are you'd have trouble finding an ISP that would agree to feed a limited number of newsgroups to you on your own schedule. For these reasons, other tools exist to help users perform offline news reading. One of the more popular of these is Leafnode (http://www.leafnode.org). NOTE
Understanding Leafnode's CapabilitiesLike INN, Leafnode is actually composed of several programs. The most important of these are:
Leafnode is designed for dynamic newsgroup configuration. If a user tries to start reading a newsgroup, Leafnode will begin fetching that newsgroup with the next run of fetchnews . If Leafnode detects no attempt to access a newsgroup for some period (a week, by default), then it stops retrieving the group. This means that you can provide the illusion that you're carrying all the newsgroups available on your upstream news provider without actually doing so. Your local users will, however, experience a delay of one fetch cycle between attempting to access a new group and seeing the posts that are available in it. One of the more unusual characteristics of Leafnode is that it doesn't require a full news feed arrangement with the upstream provider; Leaf node (or fetchnews , to be precise) presents itself as an ordinary news reader to the feed site. This means that you can use Leafnode in conjunction with your ISP's ordinary news server. NOTE
In early 2002, the current version of Leafnode is 1.9.19. Work is underway on a 2.0 release, which will add support for local newsgroups, making Leafnode suitable for running a small news server for local newsgroups. The 1.9. x versions don't support this feature, though. It's important to remember that Leafnode was designed as a news reader for small sites. It doesn't scale well, meaning that as you add users and large numbers of newsgroups, Leafnode's performance suffers. Leafnode works well for up to a few dozen clients , but it's not very useable beyond that point. If you're experiencing performance problems that are caused by a heavy server load, you should seriously consider switching to INN or some other conventional news server and obtaining a full news feed. Another problem with Leafnode is that it may drop messages if it encounters a problem. This may result in posts that aren't posted to Usenet, or in existing Usenet posts that aren't readable. Some fetchnews options attempt to work around some of these problems, as described shortly, but you may lose posts if your connection to your upstream news server is unreliable. Configuring LeafnodeConfiguring Leafnode requires setting up three programs: The leafnode server itself, the fetchnews program, and texpire to expire old news. Functions relating to all three programs are contained in a general configuration file, but you'll need to set up each program to run in its own way. If you use a Leafnode package from your Linux distribution, you shouldn't need to edit many files to get it all running. General Configuration SettingsThe main Leafnode configuration file is called config , and it's usually stored in /etc/leafnode . Aside from comments, which begin with a pound sign ( # ), this file consists of lines of the following form: parameter = value A minimal Leafnode configuration needs to set just a couple of parameters: server and expire . Other parameters are optional; they take on reasonable default values if you don't set them. The more important parameters are as follows :
WARNING
These parameters set options that relate to all three of the major Leafnode component programs ( leafnode , fetchnews , and texpire ). These programs don't have separate configuration files, but they must be run in different ways. Setting Up the ServerAs mentioned earlier, the leafnode server program is designed to be run from a super server, such as inetd or xinetd . This topic is covered in Chapter 4. A typical inetd.conf entry for Leafnode resembles the following: nntp stream tcp nowait news /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/leafnode Distributions that use xinetd usually include an appropriate startup file in their Leafnode packages that go in /etc/xinetd.d , so you shouldn't need to create such a file. You might need to enable it, though. Whether you use inetd or xinetd , chances are you'll need to restart the super server before your Leafnode server will become available to your clients. Once you've done this, the Leafnode server computer will respond to requests from news readers as if it were running INN or some other full news server package. WARNING
Fetching NewsA single run of the fetchnews program will retrieve news from your upstream news server, assuming you've configured the appropriate news server hostname in /etc/leafnode/config . The same process uploads any pending messages to your upstream news server. (You can use the newsq command to see how many outgoing messages you have waiting, as well as their titles, newsgroups, and senders.) The first time you run fetchnews , chances are the operation will take some time, as the program will fetch the active newsgroups list from the upstream server. The fetchnews program accepts several arguments, which are as follows:
TIP
The real trick to fetchnews operation is in determining when and how to run it. Two common options are to run it as a cron job and to run it in a PPP dialup script, such as ppp-on-dialer (described in Chapter 2, TCP/IP Network Configuration). Running fetchnews as a cron job makes sense when you have a connection that's constantly active, or if you want to have your computer automatically dial out and retrieve news when unattended, such as early in the morning. How often you should do so is a matter of personal preference and practical matters specific to your configuration and your upstream provider's availability. Running fetchnews as part of a PPP connect script ensures that you'll be able to read the latest news soon after you connect to the Internet. Expiring Old NewsThe texpire program peruses the news messages stored in the news spool directory and deletes old messages according to default values or those set in /etc/leafnode/config . This task should be performed on a regular basis to ensure that your hard disk doesn't overflow with old news postings. The usual way to accomplish this task is to run texpire from a cron job on a daily basis. Some distributions' Leafnode packages include an appropriate script that's dropped in /etc/cron.daily or some other location, but you shouldn't assume that your distribution maintainer has seen to this detail; you should check for such a script and, if necessary, create one or use the crontab utility to do the job. When texpire runs, it expires articles based on threads. (A thread is an original posting and associated replies.) Specifically, texpire deletes a message only if the thread hasn't been read by local users in more than the expire time. Thus, articles may be kept around for longer than you might expect, if the thread in which they reside has been recently read by Leafnode clients. Like fetchnews , texpire accepts one to four -v options to increase its verbosity. Another potentially important texpire option is -f . Ordinarily, texpire relies upon the last-access dates that Linux stores with files to determine when a thread has gone unread. Adding -f causes texpire to ignore this information. You might do this if you regularly back up your news spool directory with a program like tar , which modifies the last-access date as part of its operation, causing texpire to erroneously believe that messages are being read when they aren't. Filtering ArticlesLeafnode includes the capability to delete messages that match arbitrary criteria based on the contents of the messages' headers. For instance, suppose you read a newsgroup that's regularly disrupted by a person who posts from the account obnoxious@annoying.edu . This username will appear in the From header, so Leafnode can filter messages based on this information. To tell it to do so, you must edit a filter file, such as /etc/leafnode/filters , which contains filtering information in regular expression form. For instance, to remove posts from obnoxious@annoying.edu , you might include a line like the following: ^From:.*obnoxious@annoying\.edu Each expression in this file begins with a carat ( ^ ), then the name of the header line that's to be filtered ( From: , in this case). The period and asterisk characters ( .* ) indicate that an arbitrary number of characters may intervene. The string obnoxious@annoying can be represented directly, and so is; but the period has special meaning, so the period in .edu must be escaped with a backslash ( \ ) character. NOTE
You must tell Leafnode where to find the filter file you use. You do this with the filterfile parameter in /etc/leafnode/config , as described earlier. Although the filter file often goes in /etc/leafnode/filters , you can select any other filename you like. |