InterNetNews

InterNetNews is a Usenet News transport server, written by Rich Salz. Development of INN has now been taken over by the Internet Software Consortium, and is currently working along with a group of people on releasing INN 1.5.

This page was started to serve my "unoff" releases of INN, based on version 1.4sec2. Few of the fixes and changes in these releases were actually authored by me, I merely collected them and repackaged them. The current release is now 1.4unoff4, which is fairly stable (see below for known bugs). Several security fixes have been added as well. If you're still running 1.4sec2 or even 1.4unoff1, you should be warned that there are known holes in that release (and prior ones).

However now that official INN development has been re-invigorated I have redirected my efforts towards helping 1.5 see the light. The code base has drifted enough already -- releasing unoff5 while 1.5 is trying to integrate unoff4 stuff (as well as deal with all its own changes) would be counterproductive. There probably won't be an unoff5 release, but I will continue to collect and redestribute patches against unoff4.

Releases

5 Mar 1996: inn1.4unoff4. See the release notes.

old inn1.4unoff releases 1 through 3 can be found here

If you have config.data files for INN, please don't send them to me. Send them to the long-suffering INN FAQ maintainer. See part 9 of the INN FAQ for information on how to do it.

Need Help?

I don't officially provide consulting support for INN, but if a check for me appeared in my mailbox I wouldn't be unhappy (I could use the cash, really.) Most of the time questions I get are pretty simple and can be answered in 5 minutes, but every once in a while I get sucked into one which takes significant amounts of my time. So far it hasn't affected my job, but I don't really need the extra stress. If you have a question you want to ask, please read the FAQ first and all the INN docs and man pages! E-mail is better than calling, though I understand sometimes it's just easier to pick up the phone. Please try asking in a news.software.nntp first. If you don't have access to news (yet!), then send email to inn-questions@pilhuhn.de and they will automatically be posted to news.software.nntp for you with a short paragraph explaining that you need an e-mail reply.

Known Bugs in 1.4unoff4

Mike Bird has done a lot of work trying to tune the streaming NNTP code, and has fixed some bugs too. Here's a patch file which includes both his 15Mar96 and 20May96 patches. I haven't tried this, but it looks good. Please send feedback.
Alan Barrett has a patch which changes changes the main I/O loop in innd to put greater priority on handling new connections, and also retunes things such that the loop gets executed more frequently. This should help medium to large sites using streaming who have been having problems with slow startup of news readers. Here is the patch
The sharedactive.patch appears to be broken. It doesn't correctly parse the active file when reaching groups which are aliased. I have a new version of the patch available which reportedly fixes this. (you'll need to back out the old patch before applying the new one) (20 Mar 96)
crosspost has a bug where it doesn't correctly make directories if they are missing. Here's a fix from the author.
If you restrict newsgroups using wildcards in nnrp.access, these groups are still shown if you do an explicit list active for the newsgroup. However the group command will correctly show that the group does not exist.
Also still the "DEBUG ERROR SITEspool: trashed" messages. This is apparently due to the innd.spool patch. As far as I can tell the message is "mostly harmless". I have tracked it down as far as WCHANflush() getting called with the handle of a channel (which is a socket), except as the comment to the function says it's only supposed to be used on file channels.

mirror of The INN FAQ (maintained by Heiko Rupp)

Part 1/9: General Information
Part 2/9: Specific notes for specific operating systems
Part 3/9: Reasons why INN isn't starting
Part 4/9: Debugging & Configuring Information
Part 5/9: Other error messages and what they mean
Part 6/9: Day-to-day operation and changes to the system
Part 7/9: Problems with INN already running
Part 8/9: Appendix A: Norman's install guide
Part 9/9: Appendix B: Configurations for certain systems

Contributed INN software

You can get some contributed software for INN here.

Items with a '*' are included in INN1.4unoff4.

actgroups.shar A script which fiddles your expire rate depending on how actively-read a particular group is.
enh-du2.tar.gz An "enhanced" du I got off the net back in '93. Much faster and has a lot of neat features.
*inndf.c Mini 'df' to call from innwatch.ctl. Doesn't sync() like df does, and no need to use awk to parse output. Does -i too.
*fastfs.c Turns on/off delayed inode updates for dramatic speedups in things like restore or expire (fastrm). Use with care.
*findmissing.pl Quick perl script to find (so you can delete) files in your news spool which aren't in your history database.
*maintain-newsgroup.shar A script to merge newsgroups files
newstools-1.3.tar.gz Various news admin utilities. (I haven't checked this out yet)
checklinks.pl Go through history file and for each post that is crossposted, verify and restore proper hardlinks/symlinks. Good to run after you reshuffle a spool partition to restore hardlinks to save space, or correct improper symlinks.
flowstats-1.5.1.tar.gz Get statistics on news flow (updated 21 Mar 1996).
grouper A system to manage private authenticated newsgroups in INN. (at Brown)
gup-0.4.tar.gz
*innwatch-beta3.pl A perl-based innwatch
innxbatch-for-inn1.4.tar.gz XBATCH implementation for INN. (streaming NNTP mods mostly obsolete this, except for if you want to also do compression) Will NOT work with inn1.4unoff3!
recover.junk.gz refile 'junk' articles back to news spool after you add a group
sendbatches.tar.gz
sendbatches2.0.tar.gz
sendbatches2.0.tar.gz
A news batcher
spexpire.shar A limited space-based expire
Some more scripts by noyd@u.washington.edu (Steven Jones)
A Perl INN monitor which outputs HTML
Patches for Kerberos V4 Authentication, including private group management. (From James Mathiesen at Brown University)
innlog.pl. A Perl replacement for innlog.awk, which runas a lot faster.
miscellaneous INN software at BELNET (Belgium).

Work-in-Progress

fixhist - A Perl script to santatize the history database by removing garbage entries. Fairly basic still but it should catch the most annoying corruptions which would cause expire, innd, or dbz to fail. (improved)
delayplot - A script to generate a scatter plot of articles and how long each took to arrive. (requires Berkeley 'graph', though could easily be made to use gnuplot)

Contributed INN patches

You can get various patches to INN here. Note that stuff that's not yet released in an "unoff" release can be found here, and that old stuff is in the "OLD" subdirectory.