NAME
inn.conf - Configuration data for InterNetNews programs
DESCRIPTION
inn.conf in pathetc is the primary general configuration file for all
InterNetNews programs. Settings which control the general operation of
various programs, as well as the paths to all portions of the news
installation, are found here. The INNCONF environment variable, if
set, specifies an alternate path to inn.conf.
This file is intended to be fairly static. Any changes made to it will
generally not affect any running programs until they restart. Unlike
nearly every other configuration file, inn.conf cannot be reloaded
dynamically using ctlinnd(8); innd(8) must be stopped and restarted for
relevant changes to inn.conf to take effect ("ctlinnd xexec innd" is
the fastest way to do this.)
Blank lines and lines starting with a number sign ("#") are ignored.
All other lines specify parameters, and should be of the following
form:
<name>: <value>
(Any amount of whitespace can be put after the colon and is optional.)
If the value contains embedded whitespace or any of the characters
"[]<""\:>, it must be enclosed in double quotes (""). A backslash
("\") can be used to escape quotes and backslashes inside double
quotes. <name> is case-sensitive; "server" is not the same as "Server"
or "SERVER". (inn.conf parameters are generally all in lowercase.)
If <name> occurs more than once in the file, the first value is used.
Some parameters specified in the file may be overridden by environment
variables. Most parameters have default values if not specified in
inn.conf; those defaults are noted in the description of each
parameter.
Many parameters take a boolean value. For all such parameters, the
value may be specified as "true", "yes", or "on" to turn it on and may
be any of "false", "no", or "off" to turn it off. The case of these
values is significant.
This documentation is extremely long and organized as a reference
manual rather than as a tutorial. If this is your first exposure to
INN and these parameters, it would be better to start by reading other
man pages and referring to this one only when an inn.conf parameter is
explicitly mentioned. Those parameters which need to be changed when
setting up a new server are discussed in INSTALL.
PARAMETERS
General Settings
These parameters are used by a wide variety of different components of
INN.
domain
This should be the domain name of the local host. It should not
have a leading period, and it should not be a full host address.
It is used only if the GetFQDN() routine in libinn(3) cannot get
the fully-qualified domain name by using either the gethostname(3)
or gethostbyname(3) calls. The check is very simple; if either
routine returns a name with a period in it, then it is assumed to
have the full domain name. As this parameter is rarely used, do
not use it to affect the righthand side of autogenerated Message-
IDs; see instead virtualhost and domain in readers.conf(5). The
default value is unset.
innflags
The flags to pass to innd on startup. See innd(8) for details on
the possible flags. The default value is unset.
mailcmd
The path to the program to be used for mailing reports and control
messages. The default is pathbin/innmail. This should not
normally need to be changed.
mta The command to use when mailing postings to moderators and for the
use of innmail(1). The message, with headers and an added To:
header, will be piped into this program. The string %s, if
present, will be replaced by the e-mail address of the moderator.
It’s strongly recommended for this command to include %s on the
command line rather than use the addresses in the To: and Cc:
headers of the message, since the latter approach allows the news
server to be abused as a mechanism to send mail to arbitrary
addresses and will result in unexpected behavior. There is no
default value for this parameter; it must be set in inn.conf or a
fatal error message will be logged via syslog.
For most systems, "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -oem %s" (adjusted for the
correct path to sendmail, and between double quotes) is a good
choice.
pathhost
What to put into the Path: header to represent the local site.
This is added to the Path: header of all articles that pass through
the system, including locally posted articles, and is also used
when processing some control messages and when naming the server in
status reports. There is no default value; this parameter must be
set in inn.conf or INN will not start. A good value to use is the
fully-qualified hostname of the system.
runasgroup
The group under which the news server will run. The default is
"news" and should not normally need to be changed.
runasuser
The user under which the news server will run. The default is
"news" and should not normally need to be changed.
server
The name of the default NNTP server. If nnrpdposthost is not set
and UNIX domain sockets are not supported, nnrpd(8) tries to hand
off locally-posted articles through an INET domain socket to this
server. actsync(8), nntpget(8), and getlist(8) also use this value
as the default server to connect to. In the latter cases, the
value of the NNTPSERVER environment variable, if it exists,
overrides this. The default value is unset.
Feed Configuration
These parameters govern incoming and outgoing feeds: what size of
articles are accepted, what filtering and verification is performed on
them, whether articles in groups not carried by the server are still
stored and propagated, and other similar settings.
artcutoff
Articles older than this number of days are dropped. The default
value is 10, which means that an incoming article will be rejected
if its posting date is farther in the past than ten days.
In order to disable that check on date, you can set this parameter
to 0.
The number on the "/remember/" line in expire.ctl should probably
be one more than that number in order to take into account articles
whose posting date is one day into the future.
bindaddress
Which IP address innd(8) should bind itself to. This must be in
dotted-quad format (nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn). If set to "all" or not set,
innd defaults to listening on all interfaces. The value of the
INND_BIND_ADDRESS environment variable, if set, overrides this
setting. The default value is unset.
bindaddress6
Like bindaddress but for IPv6 sockets. If only one of the
bindaddress and bindaddress6 parameters is used, then only the
socket for the corresponding address family is created. If both
parameters are used then two sockets are created. If neither of
them is used, the list of sockets to listen on will be determined
by the system library getaddrinfo(3) function. The value of the
INND_BIND_ADDRESS6, if set, overrides this setting. The default
value is unset.
Note that you will generally need to put double quotes ("") around
this value if you set it, since IPv6 addresses contain colons.
dontrejectfiltered
Normally innd(8) rejects incoming articles when directed to do so
by any enabled article filters (Perl or Python). However, this
parameter causes such articles not to be rejected; instead
filtering can be applied on outbound articles. If this parameter
is set, all articles will be accepted on the local machine, but
articles rejected by the filter will not be fed to any peers
specified in newsfeeds with the "Af" flag.
hiscachesize
If set to a value other than 0, a hash of recently received
Message-IDs is kept in memory to speed history lookups. The value
is the amount of memory to devote to the cache in kilobytes. The
cache is only used for incoming feeds and a small cache can hold
quite a few Message-IDs, so large values aren’t necessarily useful
unless you have incoming feeds that are badly delayed. innreport
can provide useful statistics regarding the use of the history
cache, especially when it misses. A good value for a system with
more than one incoming feed is 256; systems with only one incoming
feed should probably set this to 0. The default value is 256.
ignorenewsgroups
Whether newsgroup creation control messages (newgroup and rmgroup)
should be fed as if they were posted to the newsgroup they are
creating or deleting rather than to the newsgroups listed in the
Newsgroups: header. If this parameter is set, the newsgroup
affected by the control message will be extracted from the Control:
header and the article will be fed as if its Newsgroups: header
contained solely that newsgroup. This is useful for routing
control messages to peers when they are posted to irrelevant
newsgroups that shouldn’t be matched against the peer’s desired
newsgroups in newsfeeds. This is a boolean value and the default
is false.
immediatecancel
When using the timecaf storage method, article cancels are normally
just cached to be cancelled, not cancelled immediately. If this is
set to true, they will instead by cancelled as soon as the cancel
is processed. This is a boolean value and the default is false.
This setting is ignored unless the timecaf storage method is used.
linecountfuzz
If set to something other than 0, the line count of the article is
checked against the Lines: header of the article (if present) and
the article is rejected if the values differ by more than this
amount. A reasonable setting is 5, which is the standard maximum
signature length plus one (some injection software calculates the
Lines: header before adding the signature). The default value is
0, which tells INN not to check the Lines: header of incoming
articles.
maxartsize
The maximum size of article (headers and body) that will be
accepted by the server, in bytes. A value of 0 allows any size of
article, but note that innd will crash if system memory is
exceeded. The default value is 1000000 (approximately 1 MB). This
is checked against the article in wire format (CRLF at the end of
each line, leading periods protected, and with the trailing
"\r\n.\r\n" at the end). See also localmaxartsize.
maxconnections
The maximum number of incoming NNTP connections innd(8) will
accept. The default value is 50.
pathalias
If set, this value is prepended to the Path: header of accepted
posts (before pathhost) if it doesn’t already appear in the Path:
header. The main purpose of this parameter is to configure all
news servers within a particular organization to add a common
identity string to the Path: header. The default value is unset.
pathcluster
If set, this value is appended to the Path: header of accepted
posts (after pathhost) if it isn’t already present as the last
element of the Path: header. The main purpose of this parameter is
to make several news servers appear as one server. The default
value is unset.
Note that the Path: header reads right to left, so appended means
inserted at the leftmost side of the Path: header.
pgpverify
Whether to enable PGP verification of control messages other than
cancel. This is a boolean value and the default is based on
whether configure found pgp, pgpv, or gpgv.
port
What TCP port innd(8) should listen on. The default value is 119,
the standard NNTP port.
refusecybercancels
Whether to refuse all articles whose message IDs start with
"<cancel.". This message ID convention is widely followed by spam
cancellers, so the vast majority of such articles will be cancels
of spam. This check, if enabled, is done before the history check
and the message ID is not written to the history file. This is a
boolean value and the default is false.
This is a somewhat messy, inefficient, and inexact way of refusing
spam cancels. A much better way is to ask all of your upstream
peers to not send to you any articles with "cyberspam" in the Path:
header (usually accomplished by having them mark "cyberspam" as an
alias for your machine in their feed configuration). The filtering
enabled by this parameter is hard-coded; general filtering of
message IDs can be done via the embedded filtering support.
remembertrash
By default, innd(8) records rejected articles in history so that,
if offered the same article again, it can be refused before it is
sent. If you wish to disable this behavior, set this to false.
This can cause a substantial increase in the amount of bandwidth
consumed by incoming news if you have several peers and reject a
lot of articles, so be careful with it. Even if this is set to
true, INN won’t log some rejected articles to history if there’s
reason to believe the article might be accepted if offered by a
different peer, so there is usually no reason to set this to false
(although doing so can decrease the size of the history file).
This is a boolean value and the default is true.
sourceaddress
Which local IP address to bind to for outgoing NNTP sockets (used
by innxmit(8) among other programs, as well as innfeed(8) as long
as not overridden by bindaddress in innfeed.conf(5)). This must be
in dotted-quad format (nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn). If set to "all", the
operating system will choose the source IP address for outgoing
connections. The default value is unset.
sourceaddress6
Like sourceaddress but for IPv6 sockets. Note that you will
generally need to put double quotes ("") around this value if you
set it, since IPv6 addresses contain colons.
verifycancels
Set this to true to enable a simplistic check on all cancel
messages, attempting to verify (by simple header comparison) that
at least one newsgroup in the cancel message can be found in the
article to be cancelled. This check can’t be done if the cancel
arrives before the article does. This is a boolean value, and the
default is false.
Note that RFC 5537 (USEPRO) mentions that "cancel control messages
are not required to contain From: and Sender: header fields
matching the target message. This requirement only encouraged
cancel issuers to conceal their identity and provided no security".
This check is therefore not done as it is extremely easy to spoof.
verifygroups
Set this to true to reject incoming articles which contain an
unknown newsgroup in the whole list of newsgroups to which they are
posted. In case wanttrash is set to true, such articles will still
be rejected. This is a boolean value, and the default is false.
wanttrash
Set this to true if you want to file articles posted to unknown
newsgroups (newsgroups not in the active file) into the "junk"
newsgroup rather than rejecting them. This is sometimes useful for
a transit news server that needs to propagate articles (according
to the setting of "Aj" in the newsfeeds feed pattern) in all
newsgroups regardless if they’re carried locally. This is a
boolean value and the default is false.
The logtrash parameter specifies whether such articles should be
logged as posted to unwanted newsgroups in the news log file.
wipcheck
If INN is offered an article by a peer on one channel, it will
return deferral responses (code 436) to all other offers of that
article for this many seconds. (After this long, if the peer that
offered the article still hasn’t sent it, it will be accepted from
other channels.) The default value is 5 and probably doesn’t need
to be changed.
wipexpire
How long, in seconds, to keep track of message IDs offered on a
channel before expiring articles that still haven’t been sent. The
default value is 10 and probably doesn’t need to be changed.
History Settings
The following parameter affect the history database.
hismethod
Which history storage method to use. The only currently supported
value is "hisv6". There is no default value; this parameter must
be set.
"hisv6"
Stores history data in the INN history v6 format: history(5)
text file and a number of dbz(3) database files; this may be in
true history v6 format, or tagged hash format, depending on the
build options. Separation of these two is a project which has
not yet been undertaken.
Article Storage
These parameters affect how articles are stored on disk.
cnfscheckfudgesize
If set to a value other than 0, the claimed size of articles in
CNFS cycbuffs is checked against maxartsize plus this value, and if
larger, the CNFS cycbuff is considered corrupt. This can be useful
as a sanity check after a system crash, but be careful using this
parameter if you have changed maxartsize recently. The default
value is 0.
enableoverview
Whether to write out overview data for articles. If set to false,
INN will run much faster, but reading news from the system will be
impossible (the server will be for news transit only). If this
option is set to true, ovmethod must also be set. This is a
boolean value and the default is true.
extraoverviewadvertised
Besides the seven standard overview fields (which are in order
"Subject:", "From:", "Date:", "Message-ID:", "References:",
":bytes" and ":lines") and the eighth "Xref:full" field required by
INN in order to handle crossposts, it is possible to add other
fields in the overview database. This parameter expects a list of
such header names. Overview data for these additional headers will
be generated for each new article at the time of arrival. For
instance, if you specify:
extraoverviewadvertised: [ Path Injection-Info ]
it implies that nnrpd will advertise "Path:full" and
"Injection-Info:full" as the ninth and tenth fields in response to
LIST OVERVIEW.FMT and that these two headers will be stored in the
overview database for each new article.
The default value is an empty list (no additional fields are
stored). Owing to optimizations when innd parses the articles it
receives, it is possible that all the values in the list are not
recognized by innd as standard headers. In such cases, innd will
log an error in news.err at startup and the unrecognized fields
will be discarded.
You should advertise only fields for which the overview database is
consistent, that is to say it records the content or absence of
these fields for all articles, including those already existing in
the news spool. Consequently, if you decide to add or remove a
field from your overview database, you should either modify
extraoverviewadvertised and rebuild your overview database with
makehistory(8) after removing all existing overview files, or
implement a transition period by first using extraoverviewhidden as
described below.
Use of a transition period can accommodate most overview
reconfigurations, but certain drastic changes may still require a
complete overview rebuild.
If for instance you want to store the content of the To: header in
addition to the fields already stored above, you should use:
extraoverviewadvertised: [ Path Injection-Info ]
extraoverviewhidden: [ To ]
This way, "To:full" will not be advertised by nnrpd but will be
stored for each new article. Once you know that all articles in
your overview database record the content or absence of that new
field (if expire.ctl(5) is parametered so that all your articles
expire within 30 days, you can assume the database is in such a
state after 30 days -- however, note that time to expiration can be
unpredictable with CNFS and you then have to use "cnfsstat -a" for
checking on when buffers have rolled over), you should put:
extraoverviewadvertised: [ Path Injection-Info To ]
extraoverviewhidden: [ ]
The "To" value must be added at the end of the list because order
matters and fields mentioned in extraoverviewhidden are generated
after those mentioned in extraoverviewadvertised. nnrpd will now
advertise "To:full" in response to the LIST OVERVIEW.FMT command
("full" indicates that the header appears followed by its value).
Now suppose you want to remove the content of the Injection-Info:
header from the overview. As order matters, the overview database
will no longer be consistent for the To: header. Therefore, you
need to specify:
extraoverviewadvertised: [ Path ]
extraoverviewhidden: [ To ]
And once overview data is accurate for all articles, you should
use:
extraoverviewadvertised: [ Path To ]
extraoverviewhidden: [ ]
Note that you have to restart nnrpd if it runs as a daemon whenever
you change the value of extraoverviewadvertised; a mere "ctlinnd
xexec innd" is not enough.
extraoverviewhidden
This parameter should be used in conjunction with
extraoverviewadvertised (see above for more details). It expects a
list of headers names. Overview data for these headers will be
generated for each new article at the time of arrival but, contrary
to the fields mentioned in extraoverviewadvertised, nnrpd will not
advertise them in response to the LIST OVERVIEW.FMT command. It
also implies that nnrpd will not look in the overview database for
fields mentioned in extraoverviewhidden when it handles HDR, XHDR
and XPAT requests; nnrpd will have to parse the headers of the
requested articles in the news spool, which is slower than directly
querying the overview database.
The default value is an empty list (no additional fields are
stored). Owing to optimizations when innd parses the articles it
receives, it is possible that all the values in the list are not
recognized by innd as standard headers. In such cases, innd will
log an error in news.err at startup and the unrecognized fields
will be discarded.
groupbaseexpiry
Whether to enable newsgroup-based expiry. If set to false, article
expiry is done based on storage class of storing method. If set to
true (and overview information is available), expiry is done by
newsgroup name. This affects the format of expire.ctl. This is a
boolean value and the default is true.
mergetogroups
Whether to file all postings to "to.*" groups in the
pseudonewsgroup "to". If this is set to true, the newsgroup "to"
must exist in the active file or INN will not start. (See the
discussion of "to." groups in innd(8) under CONTROL MESSAGES.)
This is a boolean value and the default is false.
nfswriter
For servers writing articles, determine whether the article spool
is on NFS storage. If set, INN attempts to flush articles to the
spool in a more timely manner, rather than relying on the operating
system to flush things such as the CNFS article bitmaps. You
should only set this parameter if you are attempting to use a
shared NFS spool on a machine acting as a single writer within a
cluster. This is a boolean value and the default is false.
overcachesize
How many cache slots to reserve for open overview files. If INN is
writing overview files (see enableoverview), ovmethod is set to
"tradindexed", and this is set to a value other than 0, INN will
keep around and open that many recently written-to overview files
in case more articles come in for those newsgroups. Every overview
cache slot consumes two file descriptors, so be careful not to set
this value too high. You may be able to use the "limit" command to
see how many open file descriptors your operating system allows.
innd(8) also uses an open file descriptor for each incoming feed
and outgoing channel or batch file, and if it runs out of open file
descriptors, it may throttle and stop accepting new news. The
default value is 64 (which is probably still too low if you have a
large number of file descriptors available).
This setting is ignored unless ovmethod is set to "tradindexed".
ovgrouppat
If set, restricts the overview data stored by INN to only the
newsgroups matching this comma-separated list of uwildmat(3)
expressions. Newsgroups not matching this setting may not be
readable, and if groupbaseexpiry is set to true and the storage
method for these newsgroups does not have self-expire
functionality, storing overview data will fail. The default is
unset.
ovmethod
Which overview storage method to use. Currently supported values
are "tradindexed", "buffindexed", and "ovdb". There is no default
value; this parameter must be set if enableoverview is true (the
default).
"buffindexed"
Stores overview data and index information into buffers, which
are preconfigured files defined in buffindexed.conf.
"buffindexed" never consumes additional disk space beyond that
allocated to these buffers.
"tradindexed"
Uses two files per newsgroup, one containing the overview data
and one containing the index. Fast for readers, but slow to
write to.
"ovdb"
Stores data into a Berkeley DB database. See the ovdb(5) man
page.
storeonxref
If set to true, articles will be stored based on the newsgroup
names in the Xref: header rather than in the Newsgroups: header.
This affects what the patterns in storage.conf apply to. The
primary interesting effect of setting this to true is to enable
filing of all control messages according to what storage class the
control pseudogroups are filed in rather than according to the
newsgroups the control messages are posted to. This is a boolean
value and the default is true.
useoverchan
Whether to innd(8) should create overview data internally through
libstorage(3). If set to false, innd creates overview data by
itself. If set to true, innd does not create; instead overview
data must be created by overchan(8) from an appropriate entry in
newsfeeds. Setting to true may be useful, if innd cannot keep up
with incoming feed and the bottleneck is creation of overview data
within innd. This is a boolean value and the default is false.
wireformat
Only used with the tradspool storage method, this says whether to
write articles in wire format. Wire format means storing articles
with "\r\n" at the end of each line and with periods at the
beginning of lines doubled, the article format required by the NNTP
protocol. Articles stored in this format are suitable for sending
directly to a network connection without requiring conversion, and
therefore setting this to true can make the server more efficient.
The primary reason not to set this is if you have old existing
software that looks around in the spool and doesn’t understand how
to read wire format. Storage methods other than tradspool always
store articles in wire format. This is a boolean value and the
default is false.
xrefslave
Whether to act as the slave of another server. If set, INN
attempts to duplicate exactly the article numbering of the server
feeding it by looking at the Xref: header of incoming articles and
assigning the same article numbers to articles as was noted in the
Xref: header from the upstream server. The result is that clients
should be able to point at either server interchangeably (using
some load balancing scheme, for example) and see the same internal
article numbering. Servers with this parameter set should
generally only have one upstream feed, and should always have
nnrpdposthost set to hand locally posted articles off to the master
server. The upstream should be careful to always feed articles in
order (innfeed(8) can have problems with this in the event of a
backlog). This is a boolean value and the default is false.
Reading
These parameters affect the behavior of INN for readers. Most of them
are used by nnrpd(8). There are some special sets of settings that are
broken out separately after the initial alphabetized list.
Note that the two parameters nnrpperlauth and nnrppythonauth are now
obsolete; see "Changes to Perl Authentication Support for nnrpd" in
doc/hook-perl and "Changes to Python Authentication and Access Control
Support for nnrpd" in doc/hook-python for more information.
allownewnews
Whether to allow use of the NEWNEWS command by clients. This
command used to put a heavy load on the server in older versions of
INN, but is now reasonably efficient, at least if only one
newsgroup is specified by the client. This is a boolean value and
the default is true. If you use the access parameter in
readers.conf, be sure to read about the way it overrides
allownewnews.
articlemmap
Whether to attempt to mmap() articles. Setting this to true will
give better performance on most systems, but some systems have
problems with mmap(). If this is set to false, articles will be
read into memory before being sent to readers. This is a boolean
value and the default is true.
clienttimeout
How long (in seconds) a client connection can be idle before it
exits. When setting this parameter, be aware that some newsreaders
use the same connection for reading and posting and don’t deal well
with the connection timing out while a post is being composed. If
the system isn’t having a problem with too many long-lived
connections, it may be a good idea to increase this value to 3600
(an hour). The default value is 1800 (thirty minutes).
initialtimeout
How long (in seconds) nnrpd will wait for the first command from a
reader connection before dropping the connection. This is a
defensive timeout intended to protect the news server from badly
behaved reader clients that open and abandon a multitude of
connections without every closing them. The default value is 10
(ten seconds), which may need to be increased if many clients
connect via slow network links.
msgidcachesize
How many cache slots to reserve for message-IDs to storage token
translations. When serving overview data to clients (NEWNEWS,
OVER, etc.), nnrpd(8) can cache the storage token associated with a
message-ID and save the cost of looking it up in the history file;
for some configurations, setting this parameter can save more than
90% of the wall clock time for a session. The default value is
16000.
nfsreader
For servers reading articles, determine whether the article spool
is on NFS storage. If set, INN will attempt to force articles and
overviews to be read directly from the NFS spool rather than from
cached copies. You should only set this parameter if you are
attempting to use a shared NFS spool on a machine acting as a
reader within a cluster. This is a boolean value and the default
is false.
nfsreaderdelay
If nfsreader is set, INN will use the value of nfsreaderdelay to
delay the apparent arrival time of articles to clients by this
amount. Note that only answers to GROUP and NEWNEWS commands are
affected. This value should be tuned based on the NFS cache
timeouts locally. The default is 60, that is to say one minute.
nnrpdcheckart
Whether nnrpd should check the existence of an article before
listing it as present in response to an NNTP command. The primary
use of this setting is to prevent nnrpd from returning information
about articles which are no longer present on the server but which
still have overview data available. Checking the existence of
articles before returning overview information slows down the
overview commands, but reduces the number of "article is missing"
errors seen by the client. This is a boolean value and the default
is true.
nnrpdflags
When nnrpd(8) is spawned from innd(8), these flags are passed as
arguments to the nnrpd process. This setting does not affect
instances of nnrpd that are started in daemon mode, or instances
that are started via another listener process such as inetd(8) or
xinetd(8). Shell quoting and metacharacters are not supported.
This is a string value and the default is unset.
nnrpdloadlimit
If set to a value other than 0, connections to nnrpd will be
refused if the system load average is higher than this value. The
default value is 16.
noreader
Normally, innd(8) will fork a copy of nnrpd(8) for all incoming
connections from hosts not listed in incoming.conf. If this
parameter is set to true, those connections will instead be
rejected with a 502 error code. This should be set to true for a
transit-only server that doesn’t support readers, or if nnrpd is
running in daemon mode or being started out of inetd. This is a
boolean value and the default is false.
readerswhenstopped
Whether to allow readers to connect even if the server is paused or
throttled. This is only applicable if nnrpd(8) is spawned from
innd(8) rather than run out of inetd or in daemon mode. This is a
boolean value and the default is false.
readertrack
Whether to enable the tracking system for client behavior. Tracked
information is recorded to pathlog/tracklogs/log-ID, where ID is
determined by nnrpd’s PID and launch time.) Currently the
information recorded includes initial connection and posting; only
information about clients listed in nnrpd.track is recorded. This
is a boolean value and the default is false.
tradindexedmmap
Whether to attempt to mmap() tradindexed overviews articles.
Setting this to true will give better performance on most systems,
but some systems have problems with mmap(). If this is set to
false, overviews will be read into memory before being sent to
readers. This is a boolean value and the default is true.
INN has optional support for generating keyword information
automatically from article body text and putting that information in
overview for the use of clients that know to look for it (HDR, OVER and
XPAT commands). The following parameters control that feature.
This may be too slow if you’re taking a substantial feed, and probably
will not be useful for the average news reader; enabling this is not
recommended unless you have some specific intention to take advantage
of it.
keywords
Whether the keyword generation support should be enabled. This is
a boolean value and the default is false.
If an article already contains a Keywords: header, no keyword
generation is done and the original Keywords: header is kept
untouched.
In order to use this feature, the regex library should be available
and INN configured with the --enable-keywords flag. Otherwise, no
keywords will be generated, even though this boolean value is set
to true. You also have to add the integration of the Keywords:
header into the overview with extraoverviewadvertised or
extraoverviewhidden.
keyartlimit
Articles larger than this value in bytes will not have keywords
generated for them (since it would take too long to do so). The
default value is 100000 (approximately 100 KB).
keylimit
Maximum number of bytes allocated for keyword data. If there are
more keywords than will fit into this many bytes when separated by
commas, the rest are discarded. The default value is 512.
keymaxwords
Maximum number of keywords that will be generated for an article.
(The keyword generation code will attempt to discard "noise" words,
so the number of keywords actually written into the overview will
usually be smaller than this even if the maximum number of keywords
is found.) The default value is 250.
Posting
These parameters are only used by nnrpd(8), inews(1), and other
programs that accept or generate postings. There are some special sets
of settings that are broken out separately after the initial
alphabetized list.
addnntppostingdate
Whether to add an NNTP-Posting-Date: header to all local posts.
This is a boolean value and the default is true.
addnntppostinghost
Whether to add an NNTP-Posting-Host: header to all local posts
giving the FQDN or IP address of the system from which the post was
received. This is a boolean value and the default is true. Note
that INN either does not add this header or adds the name or IP
address of the client. There is no intrinsic support for
obfuscating the name of the client. That has to be done with a
user-written Perl filter, if desired.
checkincludedtext
Whether to check local postings for the ratio of new to quoted text
and reject them if that ratio is under 50%. Included text is
recognized by looking for lines beginning with ">", "|", or ":".
This is a boolean value and the default is false.
complaints
The value of the X-Complaints-To: header added to all local posts.
The default is the newsmaster’s e-mail address. (If the
newsmaster, selected at configure time and defaulting to "usenet",
doesn’t contain "@", the address will consist of the newsmaster, a
"@", and the value of fromhost.)
fromhost
Contains a domain used to construct e-mail addresses. The address
of the local news administrator will be given as <user>@fromhost,
where <user> is the newsmaster user set at compile time ("usenet"
by default). This setting will also be used by mailpost(8) to
fully qualify addresses and by inews(1) to generate the Sender:
header (and From: header if missing). The value of the FROMHOST
environment variable, if set, overrides this setting. The default
is the fully-qualified domain name of the local host.
localmaxartsize
The maximum article size (in bytes) for locally posted articles.
Articles larger than this will be rejected. A value of 0 allows
any size of article, but note that nnrpd and innd will crash if
system memory is exceeded. See also maxartsize, which applies to
all articles including those posted locally. The default value is
1000000 (approximately 1 MB).
moderatormailer
The address to which to send submissions for moderated groups. It
is only used if the moderators file doesn’t exist, or if the
moderated group to which an article is posted is not matched by any
entry in that file, and takes the same form as an entry in the
moderators file. In most cases, "%s@moderators.isc.org" is a good
value for this parameter (%s is expanded into a form of the
newsgroup name). See moderators(5) for more details about the
syntax. The default is unset. If this parameter isn’t set and an
article is posted to a moderated group that does not have a
matching entry in the moderators file, the posting will be rejected
with an error.
nnrpdauthsender
Whether to generate a Sender: header based on reader
authentication. If this parameter is set, a Sender: header will be
added to local posts containing the identity assigned by
readers.conf. If the assigned identity does not include an "@",
the reader’s hostname is used. If this parameter is set but no
identity is assigned, the Sender: header will be removed from all
posts even if the poster includes one. This is a boolean value and
the default is false.
nnrpdposthost
If set, nnrpd(8) and rnews(1) will pass all locally posted articles
to the specified host rather than trying to inject them locally.
See also nnrpdpostport. This should always be set if xrefslave is
true. The default value is unset.
nnrpdpostport
The port on the remote server to connect to to post when
nnrpdposthost is used. The default value is 119.
organization
What to put in the Organization: header if it is left blank by the
poster. The value of the ORGANIZATION environment variable, if
set, overrides this setting. The default is unset, which tells INN
not to insert an Organization: header.
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.
strippostcc
Whether to strip To:, Cc:, and Bcc: headers out of all local posts
via nnrpd(8). The primary purpose of this setting is to prevent
abuse of the news server by posting to a moderated group and
including To: or Cc: headers in the post so that the news server
will send the article to arbitrary addresses. INN now protects
against this abuse in other ways provided mta is set to a command
that includes %s and honors it, so this is generally no longer
needed. This is a boolean value and the default is false.
nnrpd(8) has support for controlling high-volume posters via an
exponential backoff algorithm, as configured by the following
parameters.
Exponential posting backoff works as follows: news clients are indexed
by IP address (or username, see backoffauth below). Each time a post
is received from an IP address, the time of posting is stored (along
with the previous sleep time, see below). After a configurable number
of posts in a configurable period of time, nnrpd(8) will begin to sleep
for increasing periods of time before actually posting anything
(posting backoff is therefore activated). Posts will still be
accepted, but at an increasingly reduced rate.
After backoff has been activated, the length of time to sleep is
computed based on the difference in time between the last posting and
the current posting. If this difference is less than backoffpostfast,
the new sleep time will be 1 + (previous sleep time * backoffk). If
this difference is less than backoffpostslow but greater than
backoffpostfast, then the new sleep time will equal the previous sleep
time. If this difference is greater than backoffpostslow, the new
sleep time is zero and posting backoff is deactivated for this poster.
(Note that this does not mean posting backoff cannot be reactivated
later in the session.)
Exponential posting backoff will not be enabled unless backoffdb is set
and backoffpostfast and backoffpostslow are set to something other than
their default values.
Here are the parameters that control exponential posting backoff:
backoffauth
Whether to index posting backoffs by user rather than by source IP
address. You must be using authentication in nnrpd(8) for a value
of true to have any meaning. This is a boolean value and the
default is false.
backoffdb
The path to a directory, writeable by the news user, that will
contain the backoff database. There is no default for this
parameter; you must provide a path to a creatable or writeable
directory to enable exponential backoff.
backoffk
The amount to multiply the previous sleep time by if the user is
still posting too quickly. A value of 2 will double the sleep time
for each excessive post. The default value is 1.
backoffpostfast
Postings from the same identity that arrive in less than this
amount of time (in seconds) will trigger increasing sleep time in
the backoff algorithm. The default value is 0.
backoffpostslow
Postings from the same identity that arrive in greater than this
amount of time (in seconds) will reset the backoff algorithm.
Another way to look at this constant is to realize that posters
will be allowed to generate at most 86400/backoffpostslow posts per
day. The default value is 1.
backofftrigger
This many postings are allowed before the backoff algorithm is
triggered. The default value is 10000.
Finally, here are the parameters used by nnrpd(8) to provide TLS/SSL
support:
tlscafile
The path to a file containing certificate authority root
certificates, used to present a trust chain to a TLS client. This
parameter is only used if nnrpd is built with TLS/SSL support. The
default value is an empty string.
tlscapath
The path to a directory containing certificate authority root
certificates. Each file in the directory should contain one CA
certificate, and the name of the file should be the CA subject name
hash value. See the OpenSSL documentation for more information.
This parameter is only used if nnrpd is built with TLS/SSL support.
The default value is pathetc.
tlscertfile
The path to a file containing the server certificate to present to
TLS clients. This parameter is only used if nnrpd is built with
TLS/SSL support. The default value is pathetc/cert.pem.
tlskeyfile
The path to a file containing the encryption key for the server
certificate named in tlscertfile. This may be the same as
tlscertfile if, when you created the certificate, you put the key
in the same file (if, for example, you gave the same file name to
both the -out and -keyout options to "openssl req"). This
parameter is only used if nnrpd is built with TLS/SSL support. The
default value is pathetc/key.pem.
This file must only be readable by the news user or nnrpd will
refuse to use it.
Monitoring
These parameters control the behavior of innwatch(8), the program that
monitors INN and informs the news administrator if anything goes wrong
with it.
doinnwatch
Whether to start innwatch(8) from rc.news. This is a boolean
value, and the default is true.
innwatchbatchspace
Free space in pathoutgoing, in inndf(8) output units (normally
kilobytes), at which innd(8) will be throttled by innwatch(8),
assuming a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is 4000.
innwatchlibspace
Free space in pathdb, in inndf(8) output units (normally
kilobytes), at which innd(8) will be throttled by innwatch(8),
assuming a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is 25000.
innwatchloload
Load average times 100 at which innd(8) will be restarted by
innwatch(8) (undoing a previous pause or throttle), assuming a
default innwatch.ctl. The default value is 1000 (that is, a load
average of 10.00).
innwatchhiload
Load average times 100 at which innd(8) will be throttled by
innwatch(8), assuming a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is
2000 (that is, a load average of 20.00).
innwatchpauseload
Load average times 100 at which innd(8) will be paused by
innwatch(8), assuming a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is
1500 (that is, a load average of 15.00).
innwatchsleeptime
How long (in seconds) innwatch(8) will sleep between each check of
INN. The default value is 600.
innwatchspoolnodes
Free inodes in patharticles at which innd(8) will be throttled by
innwatch(8), assuming a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is
200.
innwatchspoolspace
Free space in patharticles and pathoverview, in inndf(8) output
units (normally kilobytes), at which innd(8) will be throttled by
innwatch(8), assuming a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is
25000.
Logging
These parameters control what information INN logs.
docnfsstat
Whether to start cnfsstat(8) when innd(8) is started. cnfsstat
will log the status of all CNFS cycbuffs to syslog on a periodic
basis (frequency is the default for "cnfsstat -l", currently 600
seconds). This is a boolean value and the default is false.
incominglogfrequency
How many articles to process on an incoming channel before logging
the activity. The default value is 200.
logartsize
Whether the size of accepted articles (in bytes) should be written
to the article log file. This is useful for flow rate statistics
and is recommended. This is a boolean value and the default is
true.
logcancelcomm
Set this to true to log "ctlinnd cancel" commands to syslog. This
is a boolean value and the default is false.
logcycles
How many old logs scanlogs(8) keeps. scanlogs(8) is generally run
by news.daily(8) and will archive compressed copies of this many
days worth of old logs. The default value is 3.
logipaddr
Whether the verified name of the remote feeding host should be
logged to the article log for incoming articles rather than the
last entry in the Path: header. The only reason to ever set this
to false is due to some interactions with newsfeeds flags; see
newsfeeds(5) for more information. This is a boolean value and the
default is true.
logsitename
Whether the names of the sites to which accepted articles will be
sent should be put into the article log file. This is useful for
debugging and statistics. This is a boolean value and the default
is true.
logstatus
Whether innd should write a shortened version of its status report
to syslog every status seconds. This is a boolean value and the
default is false. If set to true, see the status parameter for
more details on how to enable status reporting.
logtrash
Whether innd should add a line in the news log file to report
unwanted newsgroups (that is to say newsgroups not locally carried
by the news server). This is a boolean value and the default is
true. It may be useful to set it to false when wanttrash is set to
true.
nnrpdoverstats
Whether nnrpd overview statistics should be logged via syslog.
This can be useful for measuring overview performance. This is a
boolean value and the default is false.
nntplinklog
Whether to put the storage API token for accepted articles (used by
nntplink) in the article log. This is a boolean value and the
default is false.
stathist
Where to write history statistics for analysis with
contrib/stathist.pl; this can be modified with ctlinnd(8) while
innd is running. Logging does not occur unless a path is given,
and there is no default value.
status
How frequently (in seconds) innd(8) should write out a status
report. The report is written to pathhttp/inn_status.html. If
this is set to 0 or "false", status reporting is disabled. The
default value is 0.
timer
How frequently (in seconds) innd(8) should report performance
timings to syslog. If this is set to 0, performance timing is
disabled. Enabling this is highly recommended, and innreport(8)
can produce a nice summary of the timings. If set to 0,
performance timings in nnrpd(8) are also disabled, although nnrpd
always reports statistics on exit and therefore any non-zero value
is equivalent for it. The default value is 0.
System Tuning
The following parameters can be modified to tune the low-level
operation of INN. In general, you shouldn’t need to modify any of them
except possibly rlimitnofile unless the server is having difficulty.
badiocount
How many read or write failures until a channel is put to sleep or
closed. The default value is 5.
blockbackoff
Each time an attempted write returns EAGAIN or EWOULDBLOCK, innd(8)
will wait for an increasing number of seconds before trying it
again. This is the multiplier for the sleep time. If you’re
having trouble with channel feeds not keeping up, it may be good to
change this value to 2 or 3, since then when the channel fills INN
will try again in a couple of seconds rather than waiting two
minutes. The default value is 120.
chaninacttime
The time (in seconds) to wait between noticing inactive channels.
The default value is 600.
chanretrytime
How many seconds to wait before a channel restarts. The default
value is 300.
datamovethreshold
The threshold for deciding whether to move already-read data to the
top of buffer or extend the buffer. The buffer described here is
used for reading NNTP data. Increasing this value may improve
performance, but it should not be increased on Systems with
insufficient memory. Permitted values are between 0 and 1048576
(out of range values are treated as 1048576) and the default value
is 8192.
icdsynccount
How many article writes between updating the active and history
files. The default value is 10.
keepmmappedthreshold
When using buffindexed, retrieving overview data (that is,
responding to OVER or running expireover) causes mmapping of all
overview data blocks which include requested overview data for
newsgroup. But for high volume newsgroups like control.cancel,
this may cause too much mmapping at once leading to system resource
problems. To avoid this, if the amount to be mmapped exceeds
keepmmappedthreshold (in KB), buffindexed mmap’s just one overview
block (8 KB). This parameter is specific to buffindexed overview
storage method. The default value is 1024 (1 MB).
maxcmdreadsize
If set to anything other than 0, maximum buffer size (in bytes) for
reading NNTP command will have this value. It should not be large
on systems which are slow to process and store articles, as that
would lead to innd(8) spending a long time on each channel and
keeping other channels waiting. The default value is BUFSIZ
defined in stdio.h (1024 in most environments, see setbuf(3)).
maxforks
How many times to attempt a fork(2) before giving up. The default
value is 10.
nicekids
If set to anything other than 0, all child processes of innd(8)
will have this nice(2) value. This is usually used to give all
child processes of innd(8) a lower priority (higher nice value) so
that innd(8) can get the lion’s share of the CPU when it needs it.
The default value is 4.
nicenewnews
If set to anything greater than 0, all nnrpd(8) processes that
receive and process a NEWNEWS command will nice(2) themselves to
this value (giving other nnrpd processes a higher priority). The
default value is 0. Note that this value will be ignored if set to
a lower value than nicennrpd (or nicekids if nnrpd(8) is spawned
from innd(8)).
nicennrpd
If set to anything greater than 0, all nnrpd(8) processes will
nice(1) themselves to this value. This gives other news processes
a higher priority and can help overchan(8) keep up with incoming
news (if that’s the object, be sure overchan(8) isn’t also set to a
lower priority via nicekids). The default value is 0, which will
cause nnrpd(8) processes spawned from innd(8) to use the value of
nicekids, while nnrpd(8) run as a daemon will use the system
default priority. Note that for nnrpd(8) processes spawned from
innd(8), this value will be ignored if set to a value lower than
nicekids.
pauseretrytime
Wait for this many seconds before noticing inactive channels. Wait
for this many seconds before innd processes articles when it’s
paused or the number of channel write failures exceeds badiocount.
The default value is 300.
peertimeout
How long (in seconds) an innd(8) incoming channel may be inactive
before innd closes it. The default value is 3600 (an hour).
rlimitnofile
The maximum number of file descriptors that innd(8) or innfeed(8)
can have open at once. If innd(8) or innfeed(8) attempts to open
more file descriptors than this value, it is possible the program
may throttle or otherwise suffer reduced functionality. The number
of open file descriptors is roughly the maximum number of incoming
feeds and outgoing batches for innd(8) and the number of outgoing
streams for innfeed(8). If this parameter is set to a negative
value, the default limit of the operating system will be used; this
will normally be adequate on systems other than Solaris. Nearly
all operating systems have some hard maximum limit beyond which
this value cannot be raised, usually either 128, 256, or 1024. The
default value of this parameter is "-1". Setting it to 256 on
Solaris systems is highly recommended.
Paths Names
patharchive
Where to store archived news. The default value is
pathspool/archive.
patharticles
The path to where the news articles are stored (for storage methods
other than CNFS). The default value is pathspool/articles.
pathbin
The path to the news binaries. The default value is pathnews/bin.
pathcontrol
The path to the files that handle control messages. The code for
handling each separate type of control message is located here. Be
very careful what you put in this directory with a name ending in
".pl", as it can potentially be a severe security risk. The
default value is pathbin/control.
pathdb
The path to the database files used and updated by the server
(currently, active, active.times, history and its indices, and
newsgroups). The default value is pathnews/db.
pathetc
The path to the news configuration files. The default value is
pathnews/etc.
pathfilter
The path to the Perl and Python filters. The default value is
pathbin/filter.
pathhttp
Where any HTML files (such as periodic status reports) are placed.
If the news reports should be available in real-time on the web,
the files in this directory should be served by a web server. The
default value is the value of pathnews/http.
pathincoming
Location where incoming batched news is stored. The default value
is pathspool/incoming.
pathlog
Where the news log files are written. The default value is
pathnews/log.
pathnews
The home directory of the news user and usually the root of the
news hierarchy. There is no default; this parameter must be set in
inn.conf or INN will refuse to start.
pathoutgoing
Default location for outgoing feed files. The default value is
pathspool/outgoing.
pathoverview
The path to news overview files. The default value is
pathspool/overview.
pathrun
The path to files required while the server is running and run-time
state information. This includes lock files and the sockets for
communicating with innd(8). This directory and the control sockets
in it should be protected from unprivileged users other than the
news user. The default value is pathnews/run.
pathspool
The root of the news spool hierarchy. This used mostly to set the
defaults for other parameters, and to determine the path to the
backlog directory for innfeed(8). The default value is
pathnews/spool.
pathtmp
Where INN puts temporary files. For security reasons, this is not
the same as the system temporary files directory (INN creates a lot
of temporary files with predictable names and does not go to
particularly great lengths to protect against symlink attacks and
the like; this is safe provided that normal users can’t write into
its temporary directory). The default value is set at configure
time and defaults to pathnews/tmp.
EXAMPLE
Here is a very minimalist example that only sets those parameters that
are required.
mta: "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -oem %s"
ovmethod: tradindexed
pathhost: news.example.com
pathnews: /usr/local/news
hismethod: hisv6
For a more comprehensive example, see the sample inn.conf distributed
with INN and installed as a starting point; it contains all of the
default values for reference.
HISTORY
Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews and since
modified, updated, and reorganized by innumerable other people.
$Id: inn.conf.pod 8957 2010-02-08 20:52:50Z iulius $
SEE ALSO
inews(1), innd(8), innwatch(8), makehistory(8), nnrpd(8), rnews(1).
Nearly every program in INN uses this file to one degree or another.
The above are just the major and most frequently mentioned ones.