What is Peering

• Usenet peering is the exchange of articles from one News Server, to one or more other News Servers, for faster and redundant distribution in getting your article propagate to all public servers around the globe.

Obtaining A Feed

• We only provide text based groups, we do not carry or accept binaries.

• To obtain a feed from us, you need to be an Australian Telco, ISP/RSP, BBS, or Educational Institution, you need to decide if you want a partial, or full feed. Non Australian peers are are considered on a case by case basis dependant upon your existing peering arrangements.

• A Full Feed is the simplest way, this uses the IHAVE method (where we "push feed" you all articles), your News Server must have a static IP address with a custom PTR record (eg: news.yourdomain.tld) for Path's, you must also be online 24/7. We know hardware can fail, we know with single homed networks not everything always runs perfect, so if you have an outage that will be greater than a week, you should let us know, if you do not, we may disable your feed until you get back to us, and after about 90 days with no word we will likely terminate your peering.

  DFeed - the transit side of DNews for IHAVE, stores lists of article numbers that need to be sent to each peer eg: inpeer2_giga_net.feed, this file vanishes after each run, when you are unreachable, this file doesnt unlink and grows, this is not usually a problem because it is not articles just a list of article numbers, however there are still in-built safeguards that when this file exceeds the default of 10mb (which is usually a months worth) it flushes and starts again, resulting in you losing about a months worth of articles that wont be sent to you, if you let us know, we can change that to a much larger value so you shouldn't lose any articles.

  For security DNews access is by IP Address, hostname is not used for history shows it's abuse in the 90's, and reliance upon nsupdate was dubious. If you are changing your IP, you need to let us know, preferably in advance with the cutover date and time, then confirm when the changeover has taken place (so we can remove old IP from access.conf). Remember to reduce your DNS TTL a couple days before if you can, DFeed (like INN), does still use hostnames to push articles to you, just not take them from you, this can be configured, but we prefer to not rely upon DNS, because when there's a problem, doesn't everyone blame DNS ;)

• A Partial Feed is ideal for those who only want a small subset of hierarchies, for example, the Australian Universities we feed, have requested only the aus.* hierarchy, and we only push and accept posts in those hierarchies.

• A Pull Feed, this is similar to the partial feed, but it's most suited to those who can't be online 24/7, or can't have a static IP address, have limited storage, or are only interested in a very small subset of groups, for this you would configure a PULL feed (sometimes called a SUCK feed), it's best for those "let my user decide groups carried", DNews it will automatically see someone polled a group, then go out and grab all the articles, how far back it requests depends on your max_age or too_old settings, INN probably has similar settings. Once you decide what groups you want to allow on your system, you can make your decision.

  Using a Pull feed you connect to us and pull the groups and articles you want, when you want, rather than us pushing them to you (like full feed IHAVE), this way it's not important to have a static IP, rDNS, or even to be online 24/7, as this type of feed is seen by our server as a reader client it requires no special resources on our end, but you still need to obtain our permission to run this type of service, this will avoid transfer limits and bypass our anti-abuse systems that otherwise will block you.

  A Pull feed will likely only be approved to Australian NFP's or Educational facilities.

• IHAVE (push) feeds, are allowed to override Organisation and abuse contact headers on your servers local posts. Pull feeds can not override these and posts will appear as coming from news.ausics.net.

• We do ask that if you decide to cease operating your server, that you let us know, especially if taking an IHAVE feed. Just closing it and not saying anything, coming back months later looking for a feed, will see you rejected, remember word gets around, so please do the right and courteous thing and communicate with all of your peers, the content of all such messages here always remains confidential and if you can't be bothered communicating with us for change of IP, or failed hardware, then frankly you have no business running a service, it takes 30 seconds to send an Email or lodge a ticket, if you can't give your server that much attention - pull the power and leave it out!

Privacy and Logging

• As we do for our local users, you too may use a form of anonymizer for your local users to protect them from address harvesting etc, however if you do this, you must still have some form of logging or way to identify each poster and keep those logs for at least 30 days, so you are capable of dealing with spam and abuse complaints.

• We do not log articles from IHAVE peers, as these are non-local posted articles. The only exception to this is if we have a need to temporarily place the server into debug mode, Pull feed articles will be logged as discussed above they are essentially local posters.

Configuring Guides

DNews sadly is no longer supported by its authors netwinsite, it is still available from netwinsite but it is not IPv6 capable, nor is it native 64bit, however, it is still very functional, it is very powerful, fast and resource nice, not wanting a sizable chunk of system resources to run, it creates its storage buffers on demand as required, DNews is an excellent choice for IHAVE and Pull/Suck, as it was designed with Suck in mind as well as IHAVE, for those reasons we still use it today!

INN however, is actively developed, runs native 64bit and IPv6, so may be the better option if you are starting your News Server from scratch and taking a full IHAVE feed, it can be a bit harder to configure and with multiple choices of storage that often confuse, you need to select the right one for you, and ensure you have those set correctly, else messages will expire or be overwritten too soon. INN is best with IHAVE, it's not designed to work well as a Suck/Pull server, it can, but is very inefficient if you have a lot of groups (their own words - not mine)

• Maximum article size is 100KB
  Most text based providers use this limit, helping to prevent binaries abuse.

• Shy away from accepting HTML posts, most servers reject or discard them.

• Please limit cross posting to no more than 100 groups per article.

• As if we need to repeat it here, but we will - No Binaries.

The following examples will assume your server is called news.example.net and your IP Ranges are 10.10.2.* 10.10.3.* and 10.10.4.48 to 10.10.4.63

DNews - Sucking (Pull) Feed

/etc/dnews.conf:

# Many options in this file, the ones we need to set/change are as follows - 


nntp_feeder news.ausics.net *

myname news.example.net
path_stamp news.example.net

pull true
update_at *5 *
groups_at 0 5
send_at *5 *
expire_at 0 0
expire_any true

spam_stop true

spam_npost 100
spam_keepn 10



access.conf:

# This file is read top to bottom
# last match wins, so first line must default to no access

*:logoff:::*

# Allow your IP Ranges, be they internal and/or external
10.10.2.*:read,post:::*
10.10.3.*:read,post:::*
10.10.4.48/28:read:post:::*



newsfeeds.conf:

site me
    groups *,!*.bina*,!*.bain*,!*.dateien*,!local.*,!free.at, 
        !free.usenet,!free.pt,!alt.spam,!free.ucp,!unidata.*!junk.*
        
        
site $nntp_feeder
     groups *,!*.bina*,!*.bain*,!*.dateien*,!local.*,!free.at,  
          !free.usenet,!free.pt,!alt.spam,!free.ucp,!unidata.*!junk.*
       maxsize 100000
       posting
       accept default
       reject body "\nContent-transfer-encoding: base64"
        
        
Before you start DNews, download our active file
and install it in  /var/spool/dnews/work/   

Then start dnews by executing /usr/local/dnews/dnews_start.sh

(Don't forget to add that into your OS's startup procedure)


That should get you going....



DNews - IHAVE Feed

/etc/dnews.conf:

# Many options in this file,
# The ones we need to change are as follows 
# (note we now explicitly comment out some things)


#nntp_feeder news.ausics.net *

myname news.example.net
path_stamp news.example.net

suck_disable true

#pull true
#update_at *5 *
#groups_at 0 5
#send_at *5 *
#expire_at 0 0
#expire_any true


post_rec true

org Welcome to news.example.net
org_replace true

spam_stop true

spam_npost 100
spam_keepn 10




access.conf:

# This file is read top to bottom
# Last match wins, so first line must default to no access

*:logoff:::*


# Allow your IP Ranges, be they internal and/or external
10.10.2.*:read,post:::*
10.10.3.*:read,post:::*
10.10.4.48/28:read:post:::*


# My peers/feeds
news.ausics.net:ihave:::*




newsfeeds.conf:
# (WARNING:  "site me" section MUST be the FIRST entry
# it determines what you accept from us
# news.ausics.net is you sending to us)


site me
        groups *,!*.bina*,!*.bain*,!*.dateien*,!local.*,!free.at, 
           !free.usenet,!free.pt,!alt.spam,!free.ucp,!unidata.*!junk.*
        
        
site news.ausics.net
       groups *,!*.bina*,!*.bain*,!*.dateien*,!local.*,!free.at, 
    	    !free.usenet,!free.pt,!alt.spam,!free.ucp,!unidata.*!junk.*
       maxsize 100000
       type dfeed
        
        


Before you start DNews, download our active file
and install it in  /var/spool/dnews/work/

Then start dnews by executing /usr/local/dnews/dnews_start.sh

(Don't forget to add that into your OS's startup procedure)


* If you already have a feed, and are adding news.ausics.net as another 
peer, add our active file as active.add then run tellnews group_merge.
This merges our active file with your existing one adding any extra groups.

INN

/etc/news/newsfeeds:


ausics/news.ausics.net\
       :*,!*.bina*,!*.bain*,!*.dateien*,!local.*,!free.at,
    	 !free.usenet,!free.pt,!alt.spam,!free.ucp,!unidata.*,!junk.*\
       :Af,Ap,C100,G50,U5,<100000,Tm\
       :innfeed!



/etc/news/innfeed.conf  

peer ausics
{
        ip-name: news.ausics.net
    	initial-connections: 2
    	max-connections: 4
    	dynamic-method: 1	
}



/etc/news/incoming.conf

peer ausics
{
    hostname: "news.ausics.net"
}

With INN we also add a localhost access group to server

/etc/news/readers.conf: 

auth "localhost" {
    hosts: "localhost, 127.0.0.1, ::1, stdin"
        default: "<localhost>"
}
        
access "localhost" {
    users: "<localhost>"
    newsgroups: "*"
    access: RPA
}
                    
auth members {
    hosts: "10.10.2.0/24, 10.10.3.0/24, 10.10.4.48/28"
    default: "<members>"
}
            
access members {
    users: "<members>"
    newsgroups: "*"
    strippath: true
}
    

                                        

 

server:         news.example.net
pathhost:       news.example.net
organization:   Welcome to our news server https://foo.example.net
complaints:     abuse@example.net