1INND(8) InterNetNews Documentation INND(8)
2
6 innd - InterNetNews daemon
7
9 innd [-aCdfNrsSu] [-4 address] [-6 address] [-c days] [-H count] [-i
10 count] [-l size] [-m mode] [-n flag] [-o count] [-P port] [-t timeout]
11 [-T count] [-X seconds]
12
14 innd, the InterNetNews daemon, handles all incoming NNTP feeds,
15 coordinates the storage, retransmission, and overview generation for
16 all accepted articles, and manages the active(5) and history(5)
17 databases. It handles incoming connections on the NNTP port, and also
18 creates and listens to a local Unix-domain stream socket in order to
19 receive articles from local processes such as nnrpd(8) and rnews(1).
20 As the master daemon, innd should generally be started at boot and be
22 always running. It listens to a Unix-domain datagram socket for
23 commands to control its activities, commands that can be sent using
24 ctlinnd(8). The current status of innd can be obtained by running
25 "ctlinnd mode", or for more detailed output, innstat(8).
26 innd can be in one of three operating modes: running, paused, or
28 throttled. Running is the normal mode; when the server is throttled,
29 it closes connections and rejects new ones. Paused is like a temporary
30 throttle, suspending innd's activities but not causing the server to
31 shut down existing connections. The mode is normally changed via
32 ctlinnd(8), either by various automated processes (such as nightly
33 article expiration) or manually by the news administrator, but innd
34 will also throttle itself if it encounters ENOSPC errors in writing
35 data or an excessive number of I/O errors (among other problems).
36 innd normally takes care of spawning nnrpd(8) to handle connections
38 from news reading clients, but it can be run on a separate port from
39 nnrpd(8) so that feed connections and news reading connections are
40 handled separately (this can often be faster). Normally, innd listens
41 on port 119, the assigned port for NNTP; if it is desirable to run innd
42 and nnrpd(8) on separate ports, it's recommended that nnrpd(8) be given
43 port 119 (since many news reading clients connect only to that port)
44 and that port 433 be used for innd.
45 The primary configuration files that control innd's activities are
47 incoming.conf, which specifies what remote sites innd will accept
48 connections from, newsfeeds, which specifies what is to be done with
49 incoming articles besides storing them, and inn.conf, which sets a wide
50 variety of configuration parameters. Some parameters in inn.conf(5)
51 can also be set with command-line flags; for these, the command-line
52 flags take precedence if used.
53 innd must be run as the news user and news group. It will check for
55 this at startup and fail to start if not run properly. Normally it
56 should be started via rc.news(8) as part of the system boot up process.
57 It relies on the setuid root helper program innbind(8) to listen on a
58 privileged port (119, 433 or 563).
59
61 For the options below that override inn.conf settings, see inn.conf(5)
62 for the default values if neither the inn.conf setting nor the command-
63 line option is given.
64 -4 address
66 Normally, innd binds to all local IP addresses (unless bindaddress
67 is set in inn.conf). If this option is given, it specifies the IP
68 address that INN should bind as. This is only relevant for servers
69 with multiple local IP addresses. The IP address must be in
70 dotted-quad ("nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn") format.
71 If this option is specified, it's the same as setting bindaddress
73 in inn.conf and may cause changes in whether INN binds to an IPv6
74 address as well. See inn.conf(5) for more details and also the -6
75 flag for innd.
76 This option has no effect when systemd socket activation is used.
78 -6 address
80 Only applies when INN has been built with IPv6 support. Normally
81 innd binds to all local IP addresses (unless bindaddress6 is set in
82 inn.conf). If this option is given, it specifies the IPv6 address
83 that INN should bind to. The IPv6 address must be in colon-
84 separated RFC 4291 format ("n:n:n:n:n:n:n:n").
85 If this option is specified, it's the same as setting bindaddress6
87 in inn.conf and may cause changes in whether INN binds to an IPv4
88 address as well. See inn.conf(5) for more details and also the -4
89 flag for innd.
90 This option has no effect when systemd socket activation is used.
92 -a By default, if a host connects to innd but is not listed in
94 incoming.conf, the connection is handed off to nnrpd (or rejected
95 if noreader is set in inn.conf). If -a is given, incoming.conf is
96 ignored and any host can connect and transfer articles. This flag
97 should never be used with an accessible server connected to Usenet;
98 it would open the server up for all sorts of abuse.
99 -c days
101 innd normally rejects any article that is older (in days) than the
102 value of artcutoff in inn.conf. This option, if given, overrides
103 the value of that setting. If days is 0, this check is suppressed
104 and innd will accept articles regardless of how old they are.
105 -C This flag tells innd to accept and propagate but not actually
107 process cancel or supersedes messages. This is intended for sites
108 concerned about abuse of cancels, or that wish to use another
109 cancel mechanism with stronger authentication.
110 -d, -f
112 innd normally puts itself into the background, points its standard
113 output and error to log files, and disassociates itself from the
114 terminal. Using -d prevents all of this, resulting in log messages
115 being written to standard output; this is generally useful only for
116 debugging. Using -f prevents the backgrounding and disassociation
117 but still redirects output; it may be useful if you want to monitor
118 innd with a program that would be confused by forks.
119 -H count, -T count, -X seconds
121 These flags control the number of connections per seconds seconds
122 that are allowed. This code is meant to protect your server from
123 newsreader clients that make too many connections per minute (and
124 therefore these flags are probably only useful when innd is
125 spawning nnrpd). You probably should not use these options unless
126 you're having problems. The table used for this check is fixed at
127 128 entries and is used as a ring; the size was chosen to make
128 calculating the index easy and to be fairly sure that it won't run
129 out of space. In practice, it is unlikely that even half the table
130 will be used at any given moment.
131 The -H flag limits the number of times a host is allowed to connect
133 to the server per the time interval given by -X. The default is 2.
134 The -T flag limits the total number of incoming connections per the
136 time interval given by -X. The maximum value is 128, and the
137 default is 60.
138 Note that the time interval given by -X is set to 0 by default,
140 that is to say no control is done on the number of connections.
141 -i count
143 innd normally allows a maximum number of concurrent NNTP
144 connections given by the value of maxconnections in inn.conf. This
145 option, if given, overrides the value of that setting. If count is
146 0, this check is suppressed.
147 -l size
149 innd normally rejects any article larger than the value of
150 maxartsize in inn.conf. This option, if given, overrides the value
151 of that setting and specifies a maximum article size of size. If
152 size is 0, this check is suppressed.
153 -m mode
155 Normally, innd starts in the "running" mode. If this option is
156 given, it specifies what mode innd should start in. mode should
157 begin with one of "g", "p", or "t", and the starting mode will be
158 set to "running", "paused", or "throttled", respectively, based on
159 that initial letter. ("g" is short for "go".)
160 -N If this option is given, any filters (Perl or Python) are disabled
162 before innd starts (normally, filters default to being enabled).
163 The filters can be enabled after innd has started with ctlinnd(8).
164 -n flag
166 Whether innd allows (and hands off to nnrpd) reader connections
167 while paused or throttled is normally determined by the value of
168 readerswhenstopped in inn.conf. This option, if given, overrides
169 that value. If flag is "n", innd will not allow readers if it is
170 paused or throttled. If flag is "y", readers will be allowed
171 regardless of innd's operating mode.
172 -o count
174 This flag limits the number of file descriptors that are available
175 for outgoing file feeds. The default is the number of available
176 file descriptors minus some reserved for internal use (which could
177 potentially starve innd of descriptors to use for accepting new
178 connections). If innd has more file feeds than count, some of them
179 will be buffered and only written out periodically.
180 Normally you never need to use this option, since the number of
182 outgoing feeds is fixed, being the number of file feeds configured
183 in newsfeeds, and is generally small (particularly given that
184 innfeed(8) is now used for most outgoing feeds at large sites).
185 -P port
187 The port innd should listen on is normally given by the value of
188 port in inn.conf. This option, if given, overrides that value and
189 specifies the port that innd should bind to.
190 -r Instructs innd to renumber the active file after starting, just as
192 if a "ctlinnd renumber" command were sent.
193 -s Just check the syntax of the newsfeeds file and exit. innd will
195 exit with a non-zero status if any errors are found; the actual
196 errors will be reported via syslog(3).
197 -S Report errors found in incoming.conf via syslog(3) and exit
199 normally. (Yes, this is less useful than it should be.)
200 -t seconds
202 Normally, innd will flush any changes to history and the active
203 file after 300 seconds of inactivity. This option changes that
204 timeout to seconds.
205 -u The news log (the trace information for every article accepted by
207 innd) is normally buffered. This option changes the log to be
208 unbuffered.
209
211 Arriving articles that have a Control: header are called "control
212 messages". Except for cancel messages, these messages are handled by
213 controlchan(8) via a feed set up in newsfeeds.
214 (Cancel messages update the history database, so they must be handled
216 internally; the cost of syncing, locking, then unlocking would be too
217 high given the number of cancel messages that are received. Note that
218 if an article is cancelled before it is received by the news server, it
219 will be rejected when it arrives since the history database has been
220 updated; it is useful for rejecting spam before it arrives.)
221 The distribution of control messages is different than that of standard
223 articles. Control messages are normally filed into the pseudo-
224 newsgroup named "control" regardless of which newsgroup they were
225 actually posted to. If, however, a "control."command newsgroup exists
226 that matches the control command, the control message will be filed
227 into that group instead. For example, a newgroup control message will
228 be filed in "control.newgroup" if that group exists; otherwise, it will
229 be filed in "control".
230 If you want to specifically feed all control messages to a given site
232 regardless of whether the control messages would affect the newsgroups
233 you're feeding that site, you can put the appropriate control newsgroup
234 in the subscription list. For example, to feed all cancel messages to
235 a given remote site (normally a bad idea), add "control.cancel" to its
236 subscription list. Normally it's best to exclude the control
237 newsgroups from feeds to keep from sending your peers more control
238 messages than they care about. That's why the newsfeeds pattern
239 "!control,!control.*" is as often as not specified (adding this
240 pattern do not prevent control messages which affect the newsgroups fed
241 to a site from being sent to it).
242 checkgroups, newgroup and rmgroup control messages receive additional
244 special treatment. If one of these control messages is approved and
245 posted to the newsgroup being created or removed (or to the admin group
246 to which the checkgroups is posted), the message will be sent to all
247 sites whose subscription patterns would cause them to receive articles
248 posted to that group. For example, if a newgroup control message for a
249 nonexistent newsgroup "news.admin.meow" is received, it will be sent to
250 any site whose subscription pattern would cause it to receive
251 "news.admin.meow" if that newsgroup existed (such as a pattern of
252 "news.admin.*"). For this reason, it is correct to post newgroup
253 messages to the newsgroup that the control message would create. It is
254 not generally correct to crosspost newgroup messages to some "well-
255 propagated" newsgroup; not only will this not actually improve their
256 propagation to sites that want such control messages, but it will also
257 cause sites that do not want those control messages to receive them.
258 Therefore, assuming that a newgroup control message is sent to the
259 group "news.admin.meow" (specified in the Newsgroups: header) in order
260 to create the group "news.admin.meow", the sites with the following
261 subscription patterns will receive it:
262 *,@news.*
264 news.*
265 news.*,!control,!control.*
266 control,control.*
267 As a matter of fact, for the first pattern, "control.newgroup" (or
269 "control") is included in "*". However, the sites with the following
270 subscription patterns will not receive it:
271 *,@news.*,!control,!control.*
273 comp.*,@news.*
274 If a control message is posted to a group whose name ends with the four
276 characters ".ctl", this suffix is stripped off and the control message
277 is propagated as if it were posted to the base group. For example, a
278 cancel message posted to "news.admin.ctl" will be sent to all sites
279 that subscribe to "control.cancel" (or "control" if that newsgroup
280 doesn't exist) or "news.admin". This behavior is present for
281 historical compatibility reasons and should be considered obsolete;
282 support for the ".ctl" suffix may be removed in a future version of
283 INN.
284 Finally, articles posted to newsgroups beginning with "to." are treated
286 specially. Provided that either that newsgroup exists in the active
287 file or mergetogroups is set in inn.conf, the remainder of the
288 newsgroup is taken to be a site name, as configured in newsfeeds, and
289 the article is sent to that site. If mergetogroups is set, the article
290 will be filed in the group named "to" (which must exist in the active
291 file). For example, with mergetogroups set, an article posted to
292 "to.uunet" will be filed in "to" and sent to the site "uunet".
293
295 innd implements the NNTP commands defined in RFC 3977 (NNTP), RFC 4643
296 (NNTP authentication), RFC 4644 (streaming NNTP feeds) and RFC 6048
297 (NNTP LIST additions) with the following differences:
298 1. A batch transfer command, XBATCH byte-count, is provided. This
300 command will read byte-count bytes and store them for later
301 processing by rnews(1) (which must be run separately, probably from
302 cron). See innxbatch(8) and sendxbatches for more details on this
303 extension.
304 2. As INN is a mode-switching news server, innd implements a limited
306 subset of the protocol useful for transferring news. The remaining
307 commands are mostly only useful for readers and are implemented by
308 nnrpd(8). Use of the MODE READER command will cause innd to pass
309 the connection to nnrpd.
310 3. innd allows a wider syntax for wildmats.
312 4. Three commands (IHAVE, CHECK and TAKETHIS) will continue, for
314 interoperability reasons, to return a reject code (respectively
315 435, 438 and 439) when the command contains a syntax error (which
316 normally leads to 501).
317
319 innd modifies as few article headers as possible, although it could be
320 better in this area.
321 Empty headers and headers that consist of nothing but whitespace are
323 dropped.
324 The local site's name (as set with the pathhost parameter in inn.conf)
326 and an exclamation point are prepended to the Path: header, provided
327 the first site name in the Path: header is different from the local
328 one. In addition, pathalias and pathcluster may be similarly
329 respectively prepended and appended to the Path: header; see
330 inn.conf(5) for the details.
331 The Xref: header is removed and a new one created.
333 innd does not rewrite incorrect headers. For example, it will not
335 replace an incorrect Lines: header, though it may reject such an
336 article depending on the value of linecountfuzz in inn.conf.
337
339 In order to efficiently apply a large number of local cancels (such as
340 from processing NoCeMs or from some other external source), INN
341 supports a special feed mode available only to connections to the local
342 Unix-domain socket (not to connections to any network sockets).
343 To enter this mode, connect to the Unix-domain socket (pathrun/nntpin)
345 and send the command MODE CANCEL. The response will have code 284.
346 Every subsequent line sent on that connection should consist of a
347 single message-ID. An attempt will be made to cancel that message-ID,
348 and the server will reply 289 for success or 484 for failure. (Failure
349 can occur, for example, if the server is paused or throttled, or the
350 message-ID is corrupt. Failure does not occur if the article to be
351 cancelled does not exist.)
352
354 innd reports all incoming articles in its log file (pathlog/news).
355 This is a text file with a variable number of space-separated fields in
356 one of the following formats:
357 mon dd hh:mm:ss.mmm + feed <message-id> site ...
359 mon dd hh:mm:ss.mmm j feed <message-id> site ...
360 mon dd hh:mm:ss.mmm c feed <message-id> Cancelling <message-id>
361 mon dd hh:mm:ss.mmm - feed <message-id> reason
362 mon dd hh:mm:ss.mmm ? feed <message-id> reason
363 There may also be hostname and/or size fields after the message-ID
365 depending on the settings of nntplinklog and logartsize in inn.conf.
366 The first three fields are the date and time to millisecond resolution.
368 The fifth field is the site that sent the article (based on the Path:
369 header) and the sixth field is the article's message-ID; they will be a
370 question mark if the information is not available.
371 The fourth field indicates whether the article was accepted or not. If
373 it is a plus sign, then the article was accepted. If it is the letter
374 "j", then the article was accepted, providing all of the newsgroups to
375 which the article was posted were set to status "j" in the active file
376 (or not listed in the active file and wanttrash was set in inn.conf),
377 and then the article was filed into the "junk" newsgroup. In both of
378 these cases, the article has been accepted and the "site ..." field
379 contains the space-separated list of sites to which the article is
380 being sent.
381 If the fourth field is the letter "c", then a cancel message was
383 accepted before the original article arrived, and a history entry for
384 the cancelled message was created so that innd will reject that message
385 if it arrives later.
386 If the fourth field is a minus sign, then the article was rejected.
388 The reasons for rejection generated by innd include:
389 "%s" header too long
391 Article exceeds local limit of %s bytes
392 Article posted in the future -- "%s"
393 Bad "%s" header
394 Can't write history
395 Duplicate
396 Duplicate "%s" header
397 EOF in headers
398 Linecount %s != %s +- %s
399 Missing %s header
400 No body
401 No colon-space in "%s" header
402 No matching newsgroups in cancel <%s>
403 No space
404 Space before colon in "%s" header
405 Too old -- "%s"
406 Unapproved for "%s"
407 Unwanted newsgroup "%s"
408 Unwanted distribution "%s"
409 Whitespace in "Newsgroups" header -- "%s"
410 where %s, above, is replaced by more specific information. (The Perl
412 and Python filters, if used, may reject articles with other reasons.)
413 If the fourth field is the letter "?", the article contains strange
415 strings, such as CR without LF or LF without CR. (These characters
416 should never occur in isolation, only together as CRLF to indicate the
417 end of a line.) This log message is just informational, to give an
418 idea of how widespread such articles are; innd does not reject such
419 articles.
420 Note that when wanttrash is set to true in inn.conf and an article is
422 received that isn't posted to any valid newsgroups, it will be accepted
423 and logged with two lines, a "j" line and a minus sign line, unless the
424 logtrash parameter is set to false (in which case only the "j" line is
425 written).
426 innd also makes extensive reports through syslog(3). The first word of
428 the log message will be the name of the site if the entry is site-
429 specific (such as a "connected" message). The first word will be
430 "SERVER" if the message relates to the server itself, such as when a
431 read error occurs.
432 If the second word is the four letters "cant", then an error is being
434 reported. (The absence of an apostrophe is intentional; it makes it
435 easier to grep from the command line and easier to find error messages
436 in FAQs using a search engine. However, "can't" is also used at a few
437 places.) In this case, the next two words generally name the system
438 call or library routine that failed and the object upon which the
439 action was being performed. The rest of the line may contain other
440 information.
441 In other cases, the second word attempts to summarize what change has
443 been made, while the rest of the line gives more specific information.
444 The word "internal" generally indicates an internal logic error.
445
447 innd will catch SIGTERM and SIGHUP and shut down. If -d is used,
448 SIGINT will also be caught and will result in an orderly shutdown.
449 innd will catch the SIGUSR1 signal and recreate the control channel
451 used by ctlinnd(8).
452
454 innd normally attempts to strip IP options from incoming connections,
455 since it uses IP-based authentication and source routing can confuse
456 that. However, this doesn't work on all systems, and it doesn't work
457 at all in the presence of IPv6 support (and is disabled in that case).
458 Hence, if using innd with IPv6 support, make sure that your kernel or
459 router disables source routing.
460
462 Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.
463 $Id: innd.pod 10523 2021-01-17 21:52:00Z iulius $
465
467 active(5), ctlinnd(8), dbz(3), history(5), incoming.conf(5),
468 inn.conf(5), innbind(8), innfeed(8), innstat(8), newsfeeds(5),
469 nnrpd(8), rnews(1), syslog(3).
470INN 2.6.4 2021-01-21 INND(8)