Peering
What is it
- 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 around the globe.
Obtaining A Feed
- To obtain a feed from us, you need to be an Australian ISP, BBS, Educational Institution (School, Tafe,
Uni etc), or incorporated Club - such as a Local PC Group, Local Linux Group, or a Special Community Group (for
example, a local Mens Shed, who only provides access at their club house).
- You need to decide what usenet groups you want, for example, if only
Australian groups, this is the aus hierarchy, so we will only send you the aus.* groups, or if you're a linux
group, we can send you just the linux.* groups. If your an ISP or University, you probably want a full Text Feed
where we will send you everything, about 30K articles a day, which is typically less than 50Mb of data per day, so
for a PC Users Club, even an old ADSL service would more than suffice.
- If taking a full feed, this will be using IHAVE (where we "push send" you all articles), your News Server must
have a static IP address and a custom PTR record for PATHs, and must be online 24/7. We know hardware fails, we know
with networks not everything is always perfect, so if you have an outage greater than twenty four (24) hours, you
should let us know as soon as possible, if you do not contact us, and we see an IHAVE feed down for more than two (2)
weeks, we may disable your feed, and after a period of ninety (90) days we will terminate the feed.
-
If you're only wanting a partial feed, limited groups or hierachies (eg: aus.* or linux.*), we can still set you up
as an IHAVE feed to ensure your chosen groups are the only ones available to your club and nobody fat-fingers your
configuration accidentally getting many hierachies filling your disk storage up rather quickly, or, you may prefere
to use a Suck (Pull) feed (where you connect to us and suck the groups and articles rather than us pushing them
to you), in a suck/pull feed you get what groups you want when you want, since these are essentially a caching server
only getting the groups you want, when you want, it's also not important to have a static IP, or be online 24/7 as
these types of feeds are seen by our server as a normal user connection, so they require no extra resources or
queue storage space on our end, we do ask however that if you decide to close your server you let us know, especially
if taking an IHAVE feed.
You still need to obtain our permission even to run a caching Suck/Pull server despite it appearing to us as a normal
usenet client, our anti-spam monitoring might block you otherwise, and in the event of criminal activity, we are
able to inform Law Enforcement that you provide a news server service to your club or organisations members and
any activity may not be attributed to a single person holding the internet account at your IP address, so ensure
you have a method of knowing which member makes what posts.
IHAVE push feeds, are also allowed to change your origin lines like abuse contact headers on your servers posts, but
suck/pull feeds can not and posts will appear as coming from news.ausics.net.
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.
Configuring Guides
Sadly, DNews is no longer in production nor supported, it is not IPv6 capable, nor is it native 64bit, however, it
is still very functional and powerful, it is very fast and resource nice, not wanting a sizable chunk of system
resources to run - for those reasons we still use it today!
INN however, is still actively developed, runs native 64bit and IPv6, so may be the better option if you are
starting your News Server from scratch.
- Maximum article size is 100KB
- Please limit cross posting to no more than 100 groups per article.
DNews has two ways of receiving a feed, either a suck (pull/caching), or ihave (push) feed (explanations above).
INN is best as an ihave (full feed) server, it's not designed to work well as a pull server, it can, but is very
inefficient if you have a lot of groups,
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
Get a list of groups, run tellnews getgroups
/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
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:
WARNING: "site me" section MUST be the FIRST un-commented entry in this file, it determines what you accept from us
and $nntp_feeder is what you send to us
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"
Start and run tellnews getgroups
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
#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
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 newsfeeds
news.ausics.net:ihave:::*
newsfeeds.conf:
# (WARNING: "site me" section MUST be the FIRST entry
# it determines what you accept from us
# $nntp_feeder is what you send 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
builtin
onlyposts
accept default
reject body "\nContent-transfer-encoding: base64"
Start and run tellnews getgroups
That should get you going....
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"
}
Download latest active file, or try: su news -s /bin/sh -c "actsync 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
}
If you copy and paste these examples, remembering to change the access IP's to suite your own network, you
should be up and running, once you get over any quirks to starting INN that is :)
And remember to modify /etc/news/inn.conf to suite your needs, in particular you'll need to customise
server: news.example.net
pathhost: news.example.net
organization: Welcome to our news server
complaints: abuse@example.net
They are the main ones, but you should at least skim over all the options there.
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