- Title:
- Hosting a INN newsserver
- Authors:
- Paolo Vincenzo Olivo
- Date:
- Topics:
- Lowtech, Self-hosting
- Id:
- 38a43f
I finally made up my mind about setting up a INN newsserver. I'll admit having been always fascinated by NNTP: it's my weak spot when it comes to old Internet protocols.
■ About NNTP
I find NNTP very suited for any form of serious debate. This is inherently bound to its design and perfectly coherent with its scope. I like that sort of structured, thread-based, plain-text debate, with posts accurately subdivided in easily accessible hierarchies. I like top quoting and wrapping at 78ch, the UI provided by most historical nntp clients, the possibility to always access this sort of info from any machine capable of connecting to the internet. The long legacy of Usenet makes it even more charming.
I've been posting on the Usenet since I was a teen, and I'm always surprised to see how certain groups (mainly under the comp.* hierarchy) are still fairly active and spam-free. But those are rare exceptions amid the ocean of spam, pirated binaries and silent and forsaken graveyards which the Usenet has turned into nowadays. I'll post my list of 'good' newsgroups another time.
■ Hosting a newsserver
Since nowadays nobody seems anymore developing newsserver software, INN appears pretty much the only viable option for anybody willing to host a private newsserver with doesn't relay with (and pull news from) any peer. Like other historical network servers for UNIX, INN reflects its age in its complex and convoluted configuration, unfriendly documentation, weird syntax and features which would be uncommon today as development choices. That said, I've come to like it.
I had my hard time getting INN to work on NetBSD (HEAD). The deamon was segfaulting on startup. I created a bug report here: <https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bugs/2022/03/14/msg071095.html>
On UniteBSD, @rvp was so kind to illustrate to me that this was caused by the compiler not finding the correct function prototype for reallocarray() on NetBSD; I therefore recompiled news/innd with CPPFLAGS="-D_OPENBSD_SOURCE" and the problem was solved.
I finished configuring my previously half-baked INN server and launched it. You can now connect to <news://retrobsd.ddns.net> at default port 119 with any client capable of speaking nntp. For the time being, the server will only host a single newsgroup for the unitedbsd community and those interested in *BSD. Seems kind to fit this server. More groups may pop up, depending on the traffic (which in all due honesty I don't expect to be high).