News

Boards runs on a piece of software called inn2 (InterNetNews). Google turned up this document about it. You shouldn't really need to touch it anyway.

Reinstalling news

These steps may require validation

  • Install inn2 from apt repos (not inn, which gives you version 1, which is completly different)
  • Copy the following : /etc/news, /var/spool/news, /var/lib/news to the relevant parts of the new machine.
  • Run makehistory -0
  • cd to /var/lib/news and run makedbz -s $(wc -l < history) -o
  • Reconfigure slrn to use this copy of Inn and check everything's there.
  • Change the ip for news.

Moving news

  • Install inn2 (obviously enough)
  • Follow the instructions here here
  • Note that you do not need anything in passwd.nntp, as I was led to believe, we seemed to hit upon some sort of weird bug, as long as the old server is listed in incoming.conf.

Mailing list boards

Stuff like this is generated by piping into a script from a mail alias

  # Mailing list to news aliases.
  #
  # $Id: lists_aliases,v 1.5 2003/11/13 11:05:47 tuama Exp $
  #

  redbrick-bugtraq: "|/srv/admin/scripts/m2n/mail2nntp.pl lists.bugtraq"
  redbrick-ilug: "|/srv/bin/m2n/mail2nntp.pl lists.ilug"
  gmail-invites: "|/srv/admin/scripts/m2n/mail2nntp.pl redbrick.gmail-invites"
  redbrick-debian-security: "|/srv/admin/scripts/m2n/mail2nntp.pl lists.debian-security"
  redbrick-apache: "|/srv/admin/scripts/m2n/mail2nntp.pl lists.apache"
  redbrick-exim: "|/srv/admin/scripts/m2n/mail2nntp.pl lists.exim"

Note: The stuff like announce or gamessoc mails going to boards is generated by mailman

rss2news

Link looks after this.

Stopping annoying daily mail

$ head /etc/cron.d/inn2
SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/lib/news/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# Expire old news and overview entries nightly, generate reports.

15 4    * * *   news    test -x /usr/lib/news/bin/news.daily && news.daily expireover lowmark delayrm nomail > /dev/null