1TINYLEAF(8) InterNetNews Documentation TINYLEAF(8)
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6 tinyleaf - Very simple IHAVE-only NNTP server
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9 tinyleaf spool [processor]
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12 tinyleaf is intended to be the simplest possible transit news server
13 that still does something useful. It must be run under inetd(8) or
14 some equivalent, and only implements three commands (HELP, IHAVE, and
15 QUIT). When it receives an article, it saves it into the directory
16 spool and, if processor is given, passes information about the article
17 to processor via a pipe. The file name of the article will be the MD5
18 hash of its message-ID, and if a file by that name already exists,
19 tinyleaf will refuse the article, reporting it as a duplicate.
20 If processor is given, it should specify the path to a program. That
22 program is started when tinyleaf starts, and its current working
23 directory will be spool. For each article received by tinyleaf, a
24 single line will be sent to standard input of processor. That line
25 will consist of the file name of the received article (relative to
26 spool), a single space, and the message-ID of the received article.
27 Note that the message-ID will be taken from the argument to the IHAVE
28 command and may not match the Message-ID: header in the article. When
29 tinyleaf shuts down, standard input to processor will be closed.
30 tinyleaf does no syntax verification of received articles whatsoever;
32 it just stores them and optionally passes them off to processor. It
33 also never deletes articles; normally, processor should do that when
34 it's finished doing whatever it needs to with the article.
35 tinyleaf expects NNTP commands on standard input and replies on
37 standard output. Status information and any error messages are sent to
38 standard error. It does no authentication; any authentication must be
39 done by inetd(8) or by a wrapper program. (One simple authentication
40 mechanism is to invoke tinyleaf via tcpd(8) from TCP wrappers and use
41 /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny to restrict who can talk to the
42 server.)
43 tinyleaf has a (currently hard-coded) maximum message size of 1 MB and
45 a (similarly hard-coded) timeout of ten minutes for each command or
46 chunk of article data.
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49 Suppose that you want to archive news articles on a particular host
50 (like the FTP server for a newsgroup archive) where you don't want the
51 overhead of running a full-blown news server. Write a program that
52 reads one line at a time from standard input and treats everything
53 before the first space as the filename of a news article to archive.
54 Each time the program reads a line, it should archive that file and
55 then delete it, and it should exit when it gets end of file on standard
56 input.
57 Then, add a line like:
59 nntp stream tcp nowait archive /usr/sbin/tcpd \
61 <pathbin>/tinyleaf <pathspool>/tinyleaf <pathbin>/archive
62 (all on one line -- the backslash and split in this line is just for
64 readability) where "archive" is the user that owns the archive,
65 /usr/sbin/tcpd is the path to tcpd(8), pathbin/tinyleaf is the path to
66 this program, pathspool/tinyleaf is some scratch directory that the
67 user "archive" has write access to, and pathbin/archive is the path to
68 your archive script.
69 You can now restrict access to tinyleaf to just your local news server
71 with "/etc/hosts.allow" and "/etc/hosts.deny" and set up an ordinary
72 feed from the server to the archive host, just like you would to any
73 other news server, of only the newsgroup that you want to archive.
74 Note that the archiving script should probably perform basic syntax and
76 validity checks on the input, since tinyleaf doesn't.
77 This is the application that motivated the original development of this
79 program.
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82 The timeout and maximum message size should really be configurable.
83 tinyleaf should also probably not just respond 500 to every command
84 other than HELP, IHAVE, and QUIT; there are more useful (and more
85 expected) error codes that could be returned.
86 An option to scan the spool directory for any left-over files and pass
88 them to the processor when starting up would be useful.
89
91 Written by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> for InterNetNews.
92 $Id: tinyleaf.pod 8794 2009-11-15 09:28:19Z iulius $
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96 hosts_access(5), inetd(8), tcpd(8).
97INN 2.5.2 2010-08-11 TINYLEAF(8)