Some random notes about the Debian INN 2.X package. If you are upgrading from a previous version, please review the information near the top of the NEWS file to learn what has changed, and what you may need to do to update your system. If you plan to use INN at home you should really consider running INN 1.x, which you can find in the inn package. INN 2.X is substantially different in terms of configuration file contents and filesystem layout than previous versions. The Debian INN package installs a minimal but functional local-only server configuration. Configuring feeds to/from other servers, and many other details, is up to you. You will want to review the information in /usr/share/doc/inn2 to get started on configuring the installation for your needs. All of the configuration files in /etc/news are flagged as 'conffiles' in the packaging system, so your work should not be overwritten without your permission if/when you upgrade the inn package in the future. In particular, make sure to update /etc/news/inn.conf to put in your organization name and related information before you establish any network connections if you don't want to be embarrassed. Also, if you are moving over from INN 1.X, please note that the directory structure under /var/spool/news has changed. At a minimum, you will need to move the article database subdirectories from /var/spool/news to /var/spool/news/articles. The set of directories that belong in /var/spool/news for 2.2.2 and later are: archive articles incoming innfeed outgoing overview Anything else is left over from a previous version, and probably should be moved or removed. It has been pointed out that inn2's use of /etc/cron.d/inn2 instead of separate files in /etc/cron.daily and so forth poses a problem for users of anacron on boxes that are not run continuously. Since the primary target for an INN installation is a fully-connected system that might easily need a variety of cron entries with different intervals, I don't intend to change this default. However, if you're bothered by this, feel free to change the cron configuration to suite your needs. If you want to use pgpverify (and you do if you're getting a real feed!), you can use the /usr/lib/news/bin/buildinnkeyring program to download the keys for some hierarchies from ftp.isc.org and add them to the gnupg keyring used by pgpverify. Log files in /var/log/news need to be owned by user 'news' for the news scanlogs tool to be able to rotate them properly. SSL ~~~ You need a certificate/key pair, by default named /etc/news/cert.pem and /etc/news/key.pem respectively. If you do not already have a PKI in place, you can create them with a command like: openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -days 1825 \ -keyout /etc/news/key.pem -out /etc/news/cert.pem The private key must have the correct permissions: chown root:news /etc/news/key.pem chmod 640 /etc/news/key.pem Kerberos Authentication ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To enable support for kerberos authentication the dependencies of /usr/lib/news/bin/auth/passwd/auth_krb5 must be installed: libkrb5-3. Large Files Support ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ On 32 bit architectures, the inn2-lfs package is built. There is no transition procedure, so if you want to convert an existing installation (this may or may not be possible depending on your choice of storage and overview formats) then you are on your own. When attempting such conversion do not forget that the package will delete /var/{spool,lib,log}/news/ when removed so they should be renamed.