Summary

News servers can be very resource- intensive ; the global Usenet news involves transfers of huge amounts of data every day, and storage of that data for a period of days on news servers around the world. Running a news server may therefore require dedicating a machine with tens or hundreds of gigabytes of disk space to the task. If your needs are more modest, though, you can run a news server without connecting it to Usenet. Such a server can host private local discussion groups, or even public discussion groups (say, for customer support purposes). In either case, the INN server is the usual choice for running a news server on Linux. This server consists of several subprograms that interact and that are configured through several files. You must set overall configuration parameters, define newsgroups you wish to carry, and set policies for who may connect to the news server as both a news feed and as a client.

Still more modest servers may run using alternative news server software. The Leafnode package, for instance, is intended for news servers with limited connectivity and few users. It fetches only those newsgroups that its users read from its upstream provider, and it transfers messages using the subset of NNTP intended for news readers. It's therefore well-suited to small sites such as very small businesses or homes , where just a few users will read news. Its main advantage over configuring local news readers to read messages directly from the ISP's news server is that it permits quick scheduled transfers of all news postings in a few groups, allowing users to read news at their leisure without keeping the network connection active.