July 13, 2004
Net News
Well, as a new project, I've decided to try to set up a news server. Mind you, I'm not going to be doing a "real" one, where I go and get some of the 10,000+ newsgroups found on a "real" news server. I just want to set up a private news server on the TheWargamer.com web site I run on my server. Not a big deal, right? Well, news servers are typical of the undocumented applications available for Unixen servers. The two popular free ones are: I set up INN, flailed about a bit, help by random web sites like Elena's UNIX Page and INN 2.4 Documentation and INN for the Impatient, but it is a struggle to figure out what all the options mean. Alot of the talk is for heavy-iron servers, dealing with the multi-gigabyte newsfeeds of today's Usenet News. But I'm not doing that - I'll be serving up a few private newsgroups with very low traffic, and figuring out which parts of the documentation apply to my setup and my version of INN has been slow going. The, for some reason, I decided to try the Diablo server. It seemed more "modern" somehow, and maybe even better documented. Well, it might be the former, but it certainly isn't the latter. As I wasn't very careful when I made the port, I now have two competing news servers installed. What a dummy:-) All I can say is Thank Goodness for the FreeBSD ports system. It at least gets things installed an running with a minimal amount of pain. I probably could never have done it by hand! So this is an ongoing project and I'll try to keep notes and let you know how it goes. Ports used:del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Yahoo MyWeb | Create Social Bookmark Links
Posted by jdarnold at 10:24 PM | TrackBack
Track with co.mments
Track with co.mments You could also try one of the smaller "leaf" news servers such as leafnode or sn. Both are designed for smaller sites, or low numbers of newsgroups. Both support posting and a bunch of other features. As you can tell, they are both very similar in target audience, but differ in their implementation.
Posted by: Rob on August 18, 2004 10:39 PMI did get INN up and running, and I took lots and lots of notes. I've passed it around to a few places for comments and hope to get a full version up soon.
Posted by: Jonathan Arnold on August 20, 2004 12:44 PM
