Sending news out of your server

Sending LOCAL posts upstream using a POSTING feed

With the posting mechanism DNEWS pretends to be a news reader and sends items into the upstream news server as if it was itself a news reader. The only tricky bit is setting the exclude parameter correctly. In newsfeeds.conf

        site me
                groups *
        site $nntp_feeder
                type builtin
                posting
                groups *
                exclude news.pbi.net

The variable $nntp_feeder is replaced by the name you have used in dnews.conf as your nntp_feeder. A posting feed is not entirely legitimate although perfectly workable you should use an IHAVE feed to send articles upstream if your provider will allow it. The main advantage of the posting feed is that it works when you only have normal news reader access to your provider.

Note: NEVER remove the 'me' feed from the top of the newsfeeds.conf file, it MUST be the first feed in the file.

Sending LOCAL posts upstream using an IHAVE feed

The IHAVE feed is the normal way to send articles upstream, to convert a posting feed to an ihave feed simply remove the 'posting' keyword from the entry in your newsfeeds.conf, e.g.

        site $nntp_feeder
                type builtin
                groups *
                exclude news.pbi.net

The variable $nntp_feeder is replaced by the name you have used in dnews.conf as your nntp_feeder. Again you MUST get your exclude parameter correct.

Note: NEVER remove the 'me' feed from the top of the newsfeeds.conf file, it MUST be the first feed in the file.

Sending a full feed onto someone else - Live Links

DNEWS 2.7 and later includes 'Live Links' this is where DNEWS holds open a channel to the site you want to send to, and as items arrive they are immediately sent on to the down stream site. This is significantly more efficient than other systems as the item does not need to be read off disk for every feed it is sent to. In this way a server can support dozens of outgoing feeds with almost no impact.

The DNEWS implementation of Live Links is extremely advanced, it includes the following features:

Here is a simple live link example (in newsfeeds.conf):

        site downstream.site.name
                type live
                groups *

Here is an example of a more complex live link using all the options.

        site downstream.site.name
                type live
                live_nchan 3
                maxsize 100000
                maxcross 5
                groups *

Routing news between other news servers

If you want to route news articles between your system and other news servers then it is important to use the 'live' links rather than the 'builtin ihave or posting' feeds. A live links feed can process hundreds of thousands of articles every day. A builtin feed is only intended to process a few thousand every day.

If you have a local incoming ihave feed (from a local bulletin board for example) which you wish to send out thru a posting feed then you must use this setting in dnews.conf.

        post_route true

Shotgun posting

Some providers are not very good at getting posts out to the rest of the world, or even if they do get out it takes many hours or even days to reach other major news systems. Shotgun posting is another innovation unique to DNEWS, basically it is where you send local posts out to several distant servers to make sure it gets around the world fast. To get posting access to a server somewhere else you might offer posting access to your system in return.

        site main.feeding.site
                type builtin
                posting
                groups *
                exclude main.feeding.site
        site distant.news.server
                type builtin
                posting
                groups *
                exclude main.feeding.site

Note the exclude parameter to prevent your system from routing items across to the distant site which is not your intention.

Writing uucp bag files

You can write rnews uucp bag files to a directory with a feed like this.

        site uucp1
                groups *
                type uucp
                uucp_dir c:\uucp_bbs
                uucp_size 4000000
                uucp_n 500

Setting your exclude parameter correctly

In newsfeeds.conf you must set your exclude parameter to stop DNEWS from sending incoming messages back to your feed site. Lets assume your feed site is called fastfeed.world.net. You need to find out what it stamps onto news articles, to do this read a news article (and show all headers so you can see the PATH header) e.g.

Newsgroups: alt.winsock.trumpet
Subject: Sportster Si does not seem to work with TRUMPET
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 22:44:08
Organization: Personal
Lines: 8
Message-ID: <moleski.2.0016BD02@sasknet.sk.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: eagle28.sasknet.sk.ca
X-Newsreader: Trumpet for Windows [Version 1.0 Rev A]
Path: fast1.world.net!world.net!news.icix.net!esol.intermedia.com

Look thru the path, left to right, and find the first or most generic name for your feed site, in this case 'world.net' looks like the best name to choose.

So here is the entry you should put in newsfeeds.conf, you may need the builtin and posting settings as well but that is up to you.

site fastfeed.world.net
groups *
exclude world.net
builtin

You may need to delete your .feed and .sending files from the spool directory to clear out the backlog of articles queued.