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General "How do I" Questions

How do I limit user access to the server?

You can limit user access to the server by username and password and by group, to do this you need to edit access.conf. This file is both tricky in it's syntax and order sensitive, but quite powerful.

Note that the Netscape news reader does not currently implement usernames and passwords so you will need to make your users use a proper news reader :-)

Here is a simple access.conf where you only allow users in your domain with ip names and you only let them connect using usernames and passwords:

# By default don't let anyone even connect
*:::!*
# Let people in my domain connect long enough to send a username/password
pc*.here.edu:read:::!*
# Here are the individual users and their passwords
pc*.here.edu:read,post:joe:joespassword:*
pc*.here.edu:read,post:alice:alicespassword:*
pc*.here.edu:read,post:jack:jackspassword:*

Here is a second example, where we want to stop joe from posting to the group local.rules, but he can read it ok still.

# By default don't let anyone even connect
*:logoff::!*
# Let people in my domain connect long enough to send a username/password
pc*.here.edu:read:::!*
# Here are the individual users and their passwords
pc*.here.edu:read:joe:joespassword:*
pc*.here.edu:post:joe:joespassword:*,!local.rules
# And don't let anyone from the finance section even connect
*finance.here.edu:logoff:::*

How do I set my local groups so they won't expire?

At the end of your expire.conf file add a line like this, lets assume your local company groups are ford.cars, ford.trucks and ford.bikes (e.g. your company name is 'ford'):

upto 1000% groups ford.* keep 999 minitems 10000 maxitems 100000

This will keep all items in the local groups for 999 days, and even then will keep at least 10000 items but will expire items if more than 100000 items are in the group. In other words the local items will be kept virtually forever.

Creating local news groups

If you wish to have local groups on your server, that are not on the server you 'suck' from, then you should remove the 'POSTING' flag from the feed to your feeder site (in newsfeeds.conf). But only if you can get IHAVE (or transfer permission) to send articles up stream rather than simple 'posting' access.

You can still have local groups if you can't get IHAVE access, it's just not the 'recommended' setup.

You can add groups with the TELLNEWS NEWGROUP command, e.g.

tellnews newgroup here.chat y myname Local group

here.chat = name of group
y = Normal group (m = moderated)
myname = A record of who created the group (one word)
Local group = description for active.names file.

To stop your local group from being sent up stream, you would change the line in your newsfeeds.conf file:

groups *,!here.chat,!here.secret.*

NOTE: KNOWN BUG, with version 2.0 items will still be sent upstream if you have left the 'POSTING' keyword in your feed.

This will probably be fixed in a future version. (of course this isn't a major problem unless the items are very secret as your upstream site will probably just reject them anyway)

How do I move the spool area to a bigger disk?

First shutdown DNEWS:

tellnews exit

Then move the entire SPOOL tree structure from it's current place to it's new place, for example on NT you might use filemanager to move

c:\dnews\spool... to e:\dnews\spool...

Change the definition of SPOOL in DNEWS.CONF

NOTEPAD \winnt35\system32\dnews.conf
spool e:\dnews\spool

Restart DNEWS:

(NT) Control Panel, Services, Start
(UNIX) su root; dnews_start.sh

How do I make the updates run only at night

Updates for a sucking feed normal run once every ten minutes, this is controlled in DNEWS.CONF with the command

update_at *5 *

This "*5" tells dnews to do an update whenever the minutes end in a digit '5' and the second "*" tells it to do updates during any hour.

To do one update a night at 5 past 2 in the morning you would use:

update_at 5 2

To do updates every 10 minutes from 6p.m. to 8a.m. you would use:

update_at *5 18-8

How do I test the server using TELNET

NNTP is a text based protocol, this means you can test it, and even read news without any software, just by using telnet and typing in commands by hand, this is not a seriously good way to read news, but it is a very good way to test your own server or your feeding server:

NT Accessories, Telnet, Connect, Remote Service
Enter the feeder.site and under PORT type in NNTP
Under Terminal Preferences turn ECHO on
Press Control J to end lines instead of ENTER
VMS $ telnet feeder.site /port=119
UNIX > telnet feeder.site 119

Type in this sequence of commands to read an article by hand:

  1. mode reader (tell it we are reading news)
  2. group comp.os.vms(select a group)
  3. head (display the header)
  4. body (display the body)
  5. next (next item please)
  6. help (show valid commands)
  7. quit (exit the connection)

How do I suck from a two sites at once?

Use the alternate suck names, NNTP_SUCK2, NNTP_SUCK3, NNTP_SUCK4

Put these in dnews.conf, followed by the list of news groups that should be sucked from these alternate sites. You should use the NNTP_FEEDER variable (suck1) for the largest number of groups.

nntp_feeder news.upstream.site *,!chat.local.*
nntp_suck2 other.news.site chat.local.*

Alternatively you can take a feed and suck from another host at the same time.

Your list of groups will be based on the NNTP_FEEDER host, other groups must be added using the tellnews newgroup command.

To do this just setup the system to suck as usual, but then add a line to access.conf to allow your secondary feed to come in, e.g.:

other.feed.machine:ihave:::*

How can I cut out spamming (cross posts)

Spamming, is where people cross post to hundreds of news groups with information which is not relevant to the content of the news group. e.g. advertising pyramid schemes etc...

Cross posting is a neat idea but enormously abused mechanism, you can limit the abuse by rejecting items that are crossposted to more than 'n' groups, a value of 5-10 would seem reasonable to me. The default is 100 for DNEWS.

You can change the limit in newsfeeds.conf under the ME settings, e.g.

site me
       groups *,!*binaries*
       maxcross 4

How can I make XOVER faster?

By default DNEWS caches the last 200 item headers that it has read, if you have spare memory then it is well worth increasing this value: The upper limit is 9000, at approx. 3K per header this would use about 27MB, but a value of 2000 would use 6MB which most systems could easily deal with. In DNEWS.CONF

HEAD_CACHE 2000

How do I move DNEWS to another computer?

Moving DNEWS to a different operating system:

  1. Install dnews on the new system
  2. Stop dnews on both systems
  3. Transfer the following files.
  4. Mode Directory Files
  5. ascii (workarea) active.*
  6. binary spool* db*.itm
  7. Start dnews
  8. tellnews check_buckets
  9. tellnews rebuild_index
  10. Wait 1 hour per gig.

If you want to, you can transfer everything and avoid the rebuild_index, use binary mode for all other files in the workarea and spool.

Moving DNEWS to another computer but same OS:

  1. Install dnews on the new system
  2. Stop dnews on both systems
  3. Copy the dnews directory and all sub directories
  4. (If the spool or history or workarea is on a different disk then copy those files as well.)

The directories, workarea, spool, config, are all defined in dnews.conf (\winnt\system32\dnews.conf) so you can make sure you haven't missed anything by checking where they point.

Check your dnews.conf and make sure spool/workarea/config/log all point to the correct new directories.

Now start dnews on the new system, and you will now need to enter your key or run tellnews register and send us the register.txt file to request a replacement key.

How do I uninstall DNEWS?

On Windows NT:

  1. cd /dnews
  2. net stop dnewssvc
  3. net stop dmgrsvc (4.6 and later)
  4. addsvc -del dnewssvc
  5. addsvc -del dmgrsvc (only 4.6 and later)
  6. del /dnews...
  7. del /winnt/system32/dnews.conf
  8. del /winnt/system32/dnews.exe
  9. del /winnt/system32/xmit.exe
  10. del /winnt/system32/drobot.exe
  11. del /winnt/system32/dposter.exe
  12. del /winnt/system32/tellnews.exe
  13. del /winnt/system32/dmgrsvc.exe

On UNIX:

  1. rm -r /var/spool/dnews
  2. rm -r /usr/local/dnews
  3. rm /etc/dnews.conf
  4. Remove dnews_start.sh from rc.local

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