15 InterNetNews Server Administration

Using the Administration utility, you can set up your news server in the following ways:

•You can use news as a local bulletin board; all information is local to your news server and is not propagated to the external InterNetNews (INN) network. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) configure news in this manner.

•You can configure your news server to be a fed site. To receive articles from another news server, you must join the INN network and make arrangements for an external news server to feed your system. (The news server that feeds articles to your system is called an external newsfeed.)

Notes:

INN is run as a single-instance server. Only one instance of this server will be run within the cluster. The /sbin/init.d scripts use Cluster Application Availability (CAA) for this service.

To configure your server to be an external newsfeed to another system in the INN network, you must use UNIX commands on the command line; the Administration utility does not provide this capability.

The InterNetNews Administration menu offers the following news server management and configuration tasks:

•Configure INN data—You can set or modify configuration data for the INN server (see Section : Specifying INN Configuration Data). Because this data is usually static, changes do not take effect until you reload the INN configuration files (see Section : Controlling the INN Server).

•Configure external newsfeeds—After arranging for one or more systems on the Usenet network to feed news articles to your system, you must add the external newsfeed to your news server configuration and set up filters to process the articles you will receive from these newsfeeds.

You can also remove external newsfeeds from your news server configuration. See Section : Configuring an External Newsfeed for more information.

•Specify client access—You can control who has access to the newsgroups on your system, and whether they can read or post articles on your server (or both). See Section : Managing Client Access for more information.

•Configure storage options—You can select different methods for storing articles. See Section : Configuring Storage Options for more information.

•Specify article expiration—You can define the rules that specify when articles expire. See Section : Managing Article Expiration for more information.

•Create and delete local newsgroups—You can create or delete newsgroups on your system. See Section : Managing Local Newsgroups for more information.

•View reports and log files—You can see the contents of the standard INN server log files

(news, news.crit, news.notice, and nntpsend.log) and get a report on server statistics from the innstat file. See Section : Viewing INN Log Files for more information.

•Control the INN server—You can shut down or restart the news server or reload the server configuration files. See Section : Controlling the INN Server for more information.

To access the InterNetNews Administration menu (shown in Figure 68), choose Manage Components from the Administration utility Main Menu, then choose InterNetNews:

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