Notes for the Debian leafnode package: Configuration ------------- See the leafnode(8) manual page and the sample configuration file for documentation of the configuration file /etc/news/leafnode/config. If you place any login and password information required to access servers in the config file be sure to check that the permissions on that file do not allow people to see this information who shouldn't be able to. Network connection type ----------------------- The Leafnode package can be configured for use on two kinds of network connection - PPP and permanent. The option chosen controls when fetchnews is run. If you select PPP, it will be started every time you bring up a PPP connection (or any other type of network connection which runs the scripts in /etc/ppp). Otherwise, it will be run hourly from the cron.d scripts. The setting can be changed running 'dpkg-reconfigure leafnode'. Naturally, if neither option does exactly what you want you can edit the relevant scripts and configuration files as you see fit. If you select PPP fetchnews will automatically be terminated whenever a PPP connection is brought down. If you do not want this to happen (for example, if you have multiple PPP connections open at once) you should comment out the line beginning "/bin/kill" in /etc/ppp/ip-down.d/leafnode. If there is sufficient demand this setup will be made an option in the configuration. This selection was introduced in version 1.9.4-6 of this package. If you upgrade from a previous version you will be asked which setting you would like to use, but in order for your selection to take effect you need to install the new cron.daily and PPP scripts. If you didn't do so when you installed the dpkg will have saved the new scripts with the same filename as the files they are inteded to preplace plus dpkg-dist. You can either copy the files over the old ones or make the appropriate changes by hand. Low volume newsgroups --------------------- One common problem with Leafnode is very low volume newsgroups, which get marked as unread since posts are less frequent than the time taken to mark the group unread. This package includes the touch_newsgroup script, which can be used to keep these low-volume newsgroups marked as read. By default, the script will be run daily and will keep the groups listed in /etc/news/leafnode/touch_groups (if it exists) marked as read. It requires perl 5 and the Net::NNTP module, avalible in the perl5 and libnet-perl pacakges. -- Mark Brown As upstream likes to fix problems with very low volume newsgroups, please file a bug if you feel the need to use touch_newsgroup and explain the circumstances. -- Robert Grimm