inn.conf - Configuration data for InterNetNews programs


DESCRIPTION

       inn.conf in pathetc is the primary general configuration
       file for all InterNetNews programs.  Settings which con­
       trol the general operation of various programs, as well as
       the paths to all portions of the news installation, are
       found here.  The INNCONF environment variable, if set,
       specifies an alternate path to inn.conf.

       Blank lines and lines starting with a number sign ("#")
       are ignored.  All other lines specify parameters, and
       should be of the following form:

           <name>: <value>

       (Any amount of whitespace can be put after the colon and
       is optional.)  Everything after the colon and optional
       whitespace up to the end of the line is taken as the
       value.  Multi-word values should not be put in quotes; if
       they are, the quotes will be taken as part of the value,
       not as delimiters.  <name> is case-sensitive; "server" is
       not the same as "Server" or "SERVER".  (inn.conf parame­
       ters are generally all in lowercase.)

       If <name> occurs more than once in the file, the first
       value is used.  Some parameters specified in the file may
       be overridden by environment variables.  Most parameters
       have default values if not specified in inn.conf; those
       defaults are noted in the description of each parameter.

       For the time being, it is strongly recommended to include
       every parameter in inn.conf even if it is set to the
       default value, since some shell scripts don't correctly
       handle missing keys that they care about.  This is a dif­
       ficult-to-fix bug in the current parser that will be fixed
       in future versions of INN.

       Many parameters take a boolean value.  For all such param­
       eters, the value may be specified as "true", "yes", or
       "on" to turn it on and may be any of "false", "no", or
       "off" to turn it off.  The case of these values is not
       significant.

       This file is intended to be fairly static.  Any changes
       made to it will generally not affect any running programs
       until they restart.  Unlike nearly every other configura­
       tion file, inn.conf cannot be reloaded dynamically using
       ctlinnd(8); innd(8) must be stopped and restarted for rel­
       evant changes to inn.conf to take effect ("ctlinnd xexec
       innd" is the fastest way to do this.)

       This documentation is extremely long and organized as a

       your first exposure to INN and these parameters, it would
       be better to start by reading other man pages and refer­
       ring to this one only when an inn.conf parameter is
       explicitly mentioned.


PARAMETERS

       General Settings

       These parameters are used by a wide variety of different
       components of INN.

       domain
           This should be the domain name of the local host.  It
           should not have a leading period, and it should not be
           a full host address.  It is used only if the GetFQDN()
           routine in libinn(3) cannot get the fully-qualified
           domain name by using either the gethostname(3) or
           gethostbyname(3) calls.  The check is very simple; if
           either routine returns a name with a period in it,
           then it is assumed to have the full domain name.  The
           default value is unset.

       innflags
           The flags to pass to innd on startup.  See innd(8) for
           details on the possible flags.  The default value is
           unset.

       mailcmd
           The path to the program to be used for mailing reports
           and control messages.  The default is pathbin/innmail.
           This should not normally need to be changed.

       mta The command to use when mailing postings to moderators
           and for the use of innmail(1).  The message, with
           headers and an added To: header, will be piped into
           this program.  The string "%s", if present, will be
           replaced by the e-mail address of the moderator.  It's
           strongly recommended for this command to include "%s"
           on the command line rather than use the addresses in
           the To: and Cc: headers of the message, since the lat­
           ter approach allows the news server to be abused as a
           mechanism to send mail to arbitrary addresses and will
           result in unexpected behavior.  There is no default
           value for this parameter; it must be set in inn.conf
           or a fatal error message will be logged via syslog.

           For most systems, "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -oem %s"
           (adjusted for the correct path to sendmail) is a good
           choice.

       pathhost
           What to put into the Path: header to represent the
           local site.  This is added to the Path: header of all

           locally posted articles, and is also used when pro­
           cessing some control messages and when naming the
           server in status reports.  There is no default value;
           this parameter must be set in inn.conf or INN will not
           start.  A good value to use is the fully-qualified
           hostname of the system.

       server
           The name of the default NNTP server.  If nnrpdposthost
           is not set and UNIX domain sockets are not supported,
           nnrpd(8) tries to hand off locally-posted articles
           through an INET domain socket to this server.
           actsync(8), nntpget(8), and getlist(8) also use this
           value as the default server to connect to.  In the
           latter cases, the value of the NNTPSERVER environment
           variable, if it exists, overrides this.  The default
           value is unset.

       Feed Configuration

       These parameters govern incoming and outgoing feeds:  what
       size of articles are accepted, what filtering and verifi­
       cation is performed on them, whether articles in groups
       not carried by the server are still stored and propagated,
       and other similar settings.

       artcutoff
           Articles older than this number of days are dropped.
           This setting should probably match the setting on the
           "/remember/" line in expire.ctl.  The default value is
           "10".

       bindaddress
           Which IP address innd(8) should bind itself to.  This
           must be in dotted-quad format (nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn).  If
           set to "all" or not set, innd defaults to listening on
           all interfaces.  The value of the INND_BIND_ADDRESS
           environment variable, if set, overrides this setting.
           The default value is unset.

       hiscachesize
           If set to a value other than "0", a hash of recently
           received message IDs is kept in memory to speed his­
           tory lookups.  The value is the amount of memory to
           devote to the cache in kilobytes.  The cache is only
           used for incoming feeds and a small cache can hold
           quite a few message IDs, so large values aren't neces­
           sarily useful unless you have incoming feeds that are
           badly delayed.  A good value for a system with more
           than one incoming feed is "256"; systems with only one
           incoming feed should probably leave this at "0".  The
           default value is "0".

           Whether newsgroup creation control messages (newgroup
           and rmgroup) should be fed as if they were posted to
           the newsgroup they are creating or deleting rather
           than to the newsgroups listed in the Newsgroups:
           header.  If this parameter is set, the newsgroup
           affected by the control message will be extracted from
           the Control: or Subject: header and the article will
           be fed as if its Newsgroups: header contained solely
           that newsgroup.  This is useful for routing control
           messages to peers when they are posted to irrelevant
           newsgroups that shouldn't be matched against the
           peer's desired newsgroups in newsfeeds.  This is a
           boolean value and the default is false.

       immediatecancel
           When using the timecaf storage method, article cancels
           are normally just cached to be cancelled, not can­
           celled immediately.  If this is set to true, they will
           instead by cancelled as soon as the cancel is pro­
           cessed.  This is a boolean value and the default is
           false.

           This setting is ignored unless the timecaf storage
           method is used.

       linecountfuzz
           If set to something other than "0", the line count of
           the article is checked against the Lines: header of
           the article (if present) and the artice is rejected if
           the values differ by more than this amount.  A reason­
           able setting is "5", which is the standard maximum
           signature length plus one (some injection software
           calculates the Lines: header before adding the signa­
           ture).  The default value is "0", which tells INN not
           to check the Lines: header of incoming articles.

       maxartsize
           The maximum size of article (headers and body) that
           will be accepted by the server, in bytes.  A value of
           "0" allows any size of article.  The default value is
           "1000000" (approximately 1MB).  See also localmaxart­
           size.

       maxconnections
           The maximum number of incoming NNTP connections
           innd(8) will accept.  The default value is "50".

       pathalias
           If set, this value is prepended to the Path: header of
           accepted posts (before pathhost) if it doesn't already
           appear in the Path: header.  The main purpose of this
           parameter is to configure all news servers within a
           particular organization to add a common identity

           unset.

       pgpverify
           Whether to enable PGP verification of control messages
           other than cancel.  This is a boolean value and the
           default is based on whether configure found pgp or
           pgpv.

       port
           What TCP port innd(8) should listen on.  The default
           value is "119", the standard NNTP port.

       refusecybercancels
           Whether to refuse all articles whose message IDs start
           with "<cancel.".  This message ID convention is widely
           followed by spam cancellers, so the vast majority of
           such articles will be cancels of spam.  This check, if
           enabled, is done before the history check and the mes­
           sage ID is not written to the history file.  This is a
           boolean value and the default is false.

           This is a somewhat messy, inefficient, and inexact way
           of refusing spam cancels.  A much better way is to ask
           all of your upstream peers to not send to you any
           articles with "cyberspam" in the Path: header (usually
           accomplished by having them mark "cyberspam" as an
           alias for your machine in their feed configuration).
           The filtering enabled by this parameter is hard-coded;
           general filtering of message IDs can be done via the
           embedded filtering support.

       remembertrash
           By default, innd(8) records rejected articles in his­
           tory so that, if offered the same article again, it
           can be refused before it is sent.  If you wish to dis­
           able this behavior, set this to false.  This can cause
           a substantial increase in the amount of bandwidth con­
           sumed by incoming news if you have several peers and
           reject a lot of articles, so be careful with it.  Even
           if this is set to true, INN won't log some rejected
           articles to history if there's reason to believe the
           article might be accepted if offered by a different
           peer, so there is usually no reason to set this to
           false (although doing so can decrease the size of the
           history file).  This is a boolean value and the
           default is true.

       sourceaddress
           Which local IP address to bind to for outgoing NNTP
           sockets (used by innxmit(8) among other programs).
           This must be in dotted-quad format (nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn).
           If set to "all" or not set, the operating system will
           choose the source IP address for outgoing connections.


       usecontrolchan
           Whether to handle control messages (other than cancel)
           in an external program rather than internally in
           innd(8).  Enabling this is highly recommended, as
           INN's internal control message handling can cause per­
           formance problems and behaves very poorly under heavy
           load.  If you want to enable this, you also must set
           up a channel feed to controlchan(8) in newsfeeds(5)
           and ensure that the group "control.cancel" exists on
           your server.  You may also have to do a few additional
           things to allow controlchan to work correctly; see
           controlchan(8) for the details.  This is a boolean
           value and the default is false.

       verifycancels
           Set this to true to enable a simplistic check on all
           cancel messages, attempting to verify (by simple
           header comparison) that the cancel message is from the
           same person as the original post.  This can't be done
           if the cancel arrives before the article does, and is
           extremely easy to spoof.  While this check may once
           have served a purpose, it's now essentially security
           via obscurity, commonly avoided by abusers, and proba­
           bly not useful.  This is a boolean value, and the
           default is false.

       wanttrash
           Set this to true if you want to file articles posted
           to unknown newsgroups (newsgroups not in the active
           file) into the "junk" newsgroup rather than rejecting
           them.  This is sometimes useful for a transit news
           server that needs to propagate articles in all news­
           groups regardless if they're carried locally.  This is
           a boolean value and the default is false.

       wipcheck
           If INN is offered an article by a peer on one channel,
           it will return deferral responses (code 436) to all
           other offers of that article for this many seconds.
           (After this long, if the peer that offered the article
           still hasn't sent it, it will be accepted from other
           channels.)  The default value is "5" and probably
           doesn't need to be changed.

       wipexpire
           How long, in seconds, to keep track of message IDs
           offered on a channel before expiring articles that
           still haven't been sent.  The default value is "10"
           and probably doesn't need to be changed.


       These parameters affect how articles are stored on disk.

       cnfscheckfudgesize
           If set to a value other than "0", the claimed size of
           articles in CNFS cycbuffs is checked against maxart­
           size plus this value, and if larger, the CNFS cycbuff
           is considered corrupt.  This can be useful as a sanity
           check after a system crash, but be careful using this
           parameter if you have changed maxartsize recently.
           The default value is "0".

       enableoverview
           Whether to write out overview data for articles.  If
           set to false, INN will run much faster, but reading
           news from the system will be impossible (the server
           will be for news transit only).  If this option is set
           to true, ovmethod must also be set.  This is a boolean
           value and the default is true.

       groupbaseexpiry
           Whether to enable newsgroup-based expiry.  If set to
           false, article expiry is done based on storage class
           of storing method.  If set to true (and overview
           information is available), expiry is done by newsgroup
           name.  This effects the format of expire.ctl.  This is
           a boolean value and the default is true.

       mergetogroups
           Whether to file all postings to "to.*" groups in the
           pseudonewsgroup "to".  If this is set to true, the
           newsgroup "to" must exist in the active file or INN
           will not start.  This is a boolean value and the
           default is false.

       overcachesize
           How many cache slots to reserve for open overview
           files.  If INN is writing overview files (see
           enableoverview), ovmethod is set to "tradindexed", and
           this is set to a value other than "0", INN will keep
           around and open that many recently written-to overview
           files in case more articles come in for those news­
           groups.  Every overview cache slot consumes two file
           descriptors, so be careful not to set this value too
           high.  You may be able to use the "limit" command to
           see how many open file descriptors your operating sys­
           tem allows.  innd(8) also uses an open file descriptor
           for each incoming feed and outgoing channel or batch
           file, and if it runs out of open file descriptors it
           may throttle and stop accepting new news.  The default
           value is "15" (which is probably way too low if you
           have a large number of file descriptors available).

           "tradindexed".

       ovgrouppat
           If set, restricts the overview data stored by INN to
           only the newsgroups matching this comma-separated list
           of wildmat expressions.  Newsgroups not matching this
           setting may not be readable, and if groupbaseexpiry is
           set to true and the storage method for these news­
           groups does not have self-expire functionality, stor­
           ing overview data will fail.  The default is unset.

       ovmethod
           Which overview storage method to use.  Currently sup­
           ported values are "tradindexed", "buffindexed", and
           "ovdb".  There is no default value; this parameter
           must be set if enableoverview is true (the default).

           ""buffindexed""
               Stores overview data and index information into
               buffers, which are preconfigured files defined in
               buffinedexed.conf.  "buffindexed" never consumes
               additional disk space beyond that allocated to
               these buffers.

           ""tradindexed""
               Uses two files per newsgroup, one containing the
               overview data and one containing the index.  Fast
               for readers, but slow to write to.

           ""ovdb""
               Stores data into a Berkeley DB database.  See the
               ovdb(5) man page.

       storeonxref
           If set to true, articles will be stored based on the
           newsgroup names in the Xref: header rather than in the
           Newsgroups: header.  This affects what the patterns in
           storage.conf apply to.  The primary interesting effect
           of setting this to true is to enable filing of all
           control messages according to what storage class the
           control pseudogroups are filed in rather than accord­
           ing to the newsgroups the control messages are posted
           to.  This is a boolean value and the default is false.

       useoverchan
           Whether to create overview data innd(8) internally
           through libstorage(3).  If set to false, innd create
           overview data by itself.  If set to true, innd does
           not create.  In the case, you need to run overchan(8)
           by creating entry in newsfeeds(5).  Setting to true
           may be useful, if innd can not keep up with incoming
           feed and the bottle neck is creating overview data
           within innd.  This is a boolean value and the default


       wireformat
           Only used with the tradspool storage method, this says
           whether to write articles in wire format.  Wire format
           means storing articles with \r\n at the end of each
           line and with periods at the beginning of lines dou­
           bled, the article format required by the NNTP proto­
           col.  Articles stored in this format are suitable for
           sending directly to a network connection without
           requiring conversion, and therefore setting this to
           true can make the server more efficient.  The primary
           reason not to set this is if you have old existing
           software that looks around in the spool and doesn't
           understand how to read wire format.  Storage methods
           other than tradspool always store articles in wire
           format.  This is a boolean value and the default is
           false.

       xrefslave
           Whether to act as the slave of another server.  If
           set, INN attempts to duplicate exactly the article
           numbering of the server feeding it by looking at the
           Xref: header of incoming articles and assigning the
           same article numbers to articles as was noted in the
           Xref: header from the upstream server.  The result is
           that clients should be able to point at either server
           interchangeably (using some load balancing scheme, for
           example) and see the same internal article numbering.
           Servers with this parameter set should generally only
           have one upstream feed, and should always have nnr­
           pdposthost set to hand locally posted articles off to
           the master server.  This is a boolean value and the
           default is false.

       Reading

       These parameters affect the behavior of INN for readers.
       Most of them are used by nnrpd(8).  There are some special
       sets of settings that are broken out separately after the
       initial alphabetized list.

       allownewnews
           Whether to allow use of the NEWNEWS command by
           clients.  This command used to put a heavy load on the
           server in older versions of INN, but is now reasonably
           efficient, at least if only one newsgroup is specified
           by the client.  This is a boolean value and the
           default is true.

       articlemmap
           Whether to attempt to mmap() articles.  Setting this
           to true will give better performance on most systems,
           but some systems have problems with mmap().  If this

           before being sent to readers.  This is a boolean value
           and the default is false.

       clienttimeout
           How long (in seconds) a client connection can be idle
           before it exits.  When setting this parameter, be
           aware that some newsreaders use the same connection
           for reading and posting and don't deal well with the
           connection timing out while a post is being composed.
           If the system isn't having a problem with too many
           long-lived connections, it may be a good idea to
           increase this value to "3600" (an hour).  The default
           value is "600" (ten minutes).

       nnrpdcheckart
           Whether nnrpd(8) should check the existence of an
           article before listing it as present in response to an
           NNTP command.  The primary use of this setting is to
           prevent nnrpd from returning information about arti­
           cles which are no longer present on the server but
           which still have overview data available.  Checking
           the existence of articles before returning overview
           information slows down the overview commands, but
           reduces the number of "article is missing" errors seen
           by the client.  This is a boolean value and the
           default is true.

       nnrpperlauth
           Whether to use the Perl hook in nnrpd(8) to authenti­
           cate readers.  If this is enabled, normal
           readers.conf(5) authentication will not be used, and
           instead the Perl hook will be called to authenticate
           connections.  This is a boolean value and the default
           is false.

       nnrppythonauth
           Whether to use the Python hook in nnrpd(8) to authen­
           ticate readers.  If this is enabled, normal
           readers.conf(5) authentication will not be used, and
           instead the python hook will be called to authenticate
           connections.  This is a boolean value and the default
           is false.

       noreader
           Normally, innd(8) will fork a copy of nnrpd(8) for all
           incoming connections from hosts not listed in incom­
           ing.conf.  If this parameter is set to true, those
           connections will instead be rejected with a 502 error
           code.  This should be set to true for a transit-only
           server that doesn't support readers, if nnrpd is being
           started out of inetd, or if nnrpd is run in daemon
           mode.  This is a boolean value and the default is
           false.

           Whether to allow readers to connect even if the server
           is paused or throttled.  This is only applicable if
           nnrpd(8) is spawned from innd(8) rather than run out
           of inetd or in daemon mode.  This is a boolean value
           and the default is false.

       readertrack
           Whether to enable the tracking system for client read­
           ing and posting.  See nnrpd.track(5) for more informa­
           tion.  This is a boolean value and the default is
           false.

       INN has optional support for generating keyword informa­
       tion automatically from article body text and putting that
       information in overview for the use of clients that know
       to look for it.  The following parameters control that
       feature.

       This may be too slow if you're taking a substantial feed,
       and probably will not be useful for the average news
       reader; enabling this is not recommended unless you have
       some specific intention to take advantage of it.

       keywords
           Whether the keyword generation support should be
           enabled.  This is a boolean value and the default is
           false.

           FIXME: Currently, support for keyword generation is
           configured into INN semi-randomly (based on whether
           configure found the regex library); it should be an
           option to configure and that option should be men­
           tioned here.

       keyartlimit
           Articles larger than this value in bytes will not have
           keywords generated for them (since it would take too
           long to do so).  The default value is "100000"
           (approximately 100KB).

       keylimit
           Maximum number of bytes allocated for keyword data.
           If there are more keywords than will fit, separated by
           commas, into this many bytes, the rest are discarded.
           The default value is "512".

       keymaxwords
           Maximum number of keywords that will be generated for
           an article.  (The keyword generation code will attempt
           to discard "noise" words, so the number of keywords
           actually writen into the overview will usually be
           smaller than this even if the maximum number of key­
           words is found.)  The default value is "250".


       These parameters are only used by nnrpd(8), inews(1), and
       other programs that accept or generate postings.  There
       are some special sets of settings that are broken out sep­
       arately after the initial alphabetized list.

       addnntppostingdate
           Whether to add an NNTP-Posting-Date: header to all
           local posts.  This is a boolean value and the default
           is true.

       addnntppostinghost
           Whether to add an NNTP-Posting-Host: header to all
           local posts giving the FQDN or IP address of the sys­
           tem from which the post was received.  This is a
           boolean value and the default is true.

       checkincludedtext
           Whether to check local postings for the ratio of new
           to quoted text and reject them if that ratio is under
           50%.  Included text is recognized by looking for lines
           beginning with ">", "|", or ":".  This is a boolean
           value and the default is false.

       complaints
           The value of the X-Complaints-To: header added to all
           local posts.  The default is the newsmaster's e-mail
           address.  (If the newsmaster, selected at configure
           time and defaulting to "usenet", doesn't contain "@",
           the address will consist of the newsmaster, a "@", and
           the value of fromhost.)

       fromhost
           Contains a domain used to construct e-mail addresses.
           The address of the local news administrator will be
           given as <user>@fromhost, where <user> is the newsmas­
           ter user set at compile time ("usenet" by default).
           This setting will also be used by mailpost(8) to fully
           qualify addresses and by inews(1) to generate the
           Sender: header (and From: header if missing).  The
           value of the FROMHOST environment variable, if set,
           overrides this setting.  The default is the fully-
           qualified domain name of the local host.

       localmaxartsize
           The maximum article size (in bytes) for locally posted
           articles.  Articles larger than this will be rejected.
           Also see maxartsize.  The default value is "1000000"
           (approximately 1MB).

       moderatormailer
           The address to which to send submissions for moderated
           groups.  It is only used if the moderators file

           article is posted is not matched by any entry in that
           file, and takes the same form as an entry in the mod­
           erators file.  In most cases, "%s@moderators.isc.org"
           is a good value for this parameter ("%s" is expanded
           into a form of the newsgroup name).  See moderators(5)
           for more details about the syntax.  The default is
           unset.  If this parameter isn't set and an article is
           posted to a moderated group that does not have a
           matching entry in the moderators file, the posting
           will be rejected with an error.

       nnrpdauthsender
           Whether to generate a Sender: header based on reader
           authentication.  If this parameter is set, a Sender:
           header will be added to local posts containing the
           authenticated user name and the reader's hostname.  If
           this is enabled but authentication does not return a
           username, the Sender: header will be removed from all
           posts even if the poster includes one.  This is a
           boolean value and the default is false.

       nnrpdposthost
           If set, nnrpd(8) and rnews(1) will pass all locally
           posted articles to the specified host rather than try­
           ing to inject them locally.  This should always be set
           if xrefslave is true.  The default value is unset.

       nnrpdpostport
           The port on the remote server to connect to to post
           when nnrpdposthost is used.  The default value is
           "119".

       organization
           What to put in the Organization: header if it is left
           blank by the poster.  The value of the ORGANIZATION
           environment variable, if set, overrides this setting.
           The default is unset, which tells INN not to insert an
           Organization: header.

       spoolfirst
           If true, nnrpd(8) will spool new articles rather than
           attempting to send them to innd(8).  If false, nnrpd
           will spool articles only if it receives an error try­
           ing to send them to innd.  Setting this to true can be
           useful if nnrpd must respond as fast as possible to
           the client; however, when set, articles will not
           appear to readers until they are given to innd.  nnrpd
           won't do this; "rnews -U" must be run periodically to
           take the spooled articles and post them.  This is a
           boolean value and the default is false.

       strippostcc
           Whether to strip To:, Cc:, and Bcc: headers out of all

           setting is to prevent abuse of the news server by
           posting to a moderated group and including To: or Cc:
           headers in the post so that the news server will send
           the article to arbitrary addresses.  INN now protects
           against this abuse in other ways provided mta is set
           to a command that includes "%s" and honors it, so this
           is generally no longer needed.  This is a boolean
           value and the default is false.

       nnrpd(8) has support for controlling high-volume posters
       via an exponential backoff algorithm, as configured by the
       following parameters.

       Exponential posting backoff works as follows:  News
       clients are indexed by IP address (or username, see back­
       offauth below).  Each time a post is received from an IP
       address, the time of posting is stored (along with the
       previous sleep time, see below).  After a configurable
       number of posts in a configurable period of time, nnrpd(8)
       will activate posting backoff and begin to sleep for
       increasing periods of time before actually posting any­
       thing.  Posts will still be accepted, but an increasingly
       reduced rate.

       After backoff has been activated, the length of time to
       sleep is computed based on the difference in time between
       the last posting and the current posting.  If this differ­
       ence is less than backoffpostfast, the new sleep time will
       be 1 + (previous sleep time * backoffk).  If this differ­
       ence is less than backoffpostslow but greater than back­
       offpostfast, then the new sleep time will equal the previ­
       ous sleep time.  If this difference is greater than back­
       offpostslow, the new sleep time is zero and posting back­
       off is deactivated for this poster.

       Exponential posting backoff will not be enabled unless
       backoffdb is set and backoffpostfast and backoffpostslow
       are set to something other than their default values.

       Here are the parameters that control exponential posting
       backoff:

       backoffauth
           Whether to index posting backoffs by user rather than
           by source IP address.  You must be using authentica­
           tion in nnrpd(8) for a value of true to have any mean­
           ing.  This is a boolean value and the default is
           false.

       backoffdb
           The path to a directory, writeable by the news user,
           that will contain the backoff database.  There is no
           default for this parameter; you must provide a path to

           tial backoff.

       backoffk
           The amount to multiply the previous sleep time by if
           the user is still posting too quickly.  A value of "2"
           will double the sleep time for each excessive post.
           The default value is "1".

       backoffpostfast
           Postings from the same identity that arrive in less
           than this amount of time (in seconds) will trigger
           increasing sleep time in the backoff algorithm.  The
           default value is "0".

       backoffpostslow
           Postings from the same identity that arrive in greater
           than this amount of time (in seconds) will reset the
           backoff algorithm.  Another way to look at this con­
           stant is to realize that posters will be allowed to
           post 86400/backoffpostslow posts per day.  The default
           value is "1".

       backofftrigger
           This many postings are allowed before the backoff
           algorithm is triggered.  The default value is "10000".

       Monitoring

       These parameters control the behavior of innwatch(8), the
       program that monitors INN and informs the news administra­
       tor if anything goes wrong with it.

       doinnwatch
           Whether to start innwatch(8) from rc.news.  This is a
           boolean value, and the default is true.

       innwatchbatchspace
           Free space in pathoutgoing, in inndf(8) output units,
           at which innd(8) will be throttled by innwatch(8),
           assuming a default innwatch.ctl(5).  The default value
           is "800".

       innwatchlibspace
           Free space in pathdb, in inndf(8) output units, at
           which innd(8) will be throttled by innwatch(8), assum­
           ing a default innwatch.ctl(5).  The default value is
           "25000".

       innwatchloload
           Load average times 100 at innd(8) will be restarted by
           innwatch(8) (undoing a previous pause or throttle),
           assuming a default innwatch.ctl(5).  The default value
           is "1000".

           Load average times 100 at which innd(8) will be throt­
           tled by innwatch(8), assuming a default
           innwatch.ctl(5).  The default value is "2000".

       innwatchpauseload
           Load average times 100 at which innd(8) will be paused
           by innwatch(8), assuming a default innwatch.ctl(5).
           The default value is "1500".

       innwatchsleeptime
           How long (in seconds) innwatch(8) will sleep between
           each check of INN.  The default value is "600".

       innwatchspoolnodes
           Free inodes in patharticles at which innd(8) will be
           throttled by innwatch(8), assuming a default
           innwatch.ctl(5).  The default value is "200".

       innwatchspoolspace
           Free space in patharticles and pathoverview, in
           inndf(8) output units, at which innd(8) will be throt­
           tled by innwatch(8), assuming a default
           innwatch.ctl(5).  The default value is "8000".

       Logging

       These parameters control what information INN logs.

       docnfsstat
           Whether to start cnfsstat(8) when innd(8) is started.
           cnfsstat will log the status of all CNFS cycbuffs to
           syslog on a periodic basis.  This is a boolean value
           and the default is false.

       logartsize
           Whether the size of accepted articles (in bytes)
           should be written to the article log file.  This is
           useful for flow rate statistics and is recommended.
           This is a boolean value and the default is true.

       logcancelcomm
           Set this to true to log "ctlinnd cancel" commands to
           syslog.  This is a boolean value and the default is
           false.

       logcycles
           How many old logs scanlogs(8) keeps.  scanlogs(8) is
           generally run by news.daily(8) and will archive com­
           pressed copies of this many days worth of old logs.
           The default value is "3".

       logipaddr
           Whether the verified name of the remote feeding host

           cles rather than the last entry in the Path: header.
           The only reason to ever set this to false is due to
           some interactions with newsfeeds flags; see
           newsfeeds(5) for more information.  This is a boolean
           value and the default is true.

       logsitename
           Whether the names of the sites to which accepted arti­
           cles will be sent should be put into the article log
           file.  This is useful for debugging and statistics and
           can be used by newsrequeue(8).  This is a boolean
           value and the default is true.

       nnrpdoverstats
           Whether nnrpd overview statistics should be logged via
           syslog.  This can be useful for measuring overview
           performance.  This is a boolean value and the default
           is false.

       nntpactsync
           How many articles to process on an incoming channel
           before logging the activity.  The default value is
           "200".

           FIXME: This is a rather unintuitive name for this
           parameter.

       nntplinklog
           Whether to put the storage API token for accepted
           articles (used by nntplink) in the article log.  This
           is a boolean value and the default is false.

       status
           How frequently (in seconds) innd(8) should write out a
           status report.  The report is written to path­
           http/inn_status.html.  If this is set to "0" or
           "false", status reporting is disabled.  The default
           value is "0".

       timer
           How frequently (in seconds) innd(8) should report per­
           formance timings to syslog.  If this is set to "0" or
           "false", performance timing is disabled.  Enabling
           this is highly recommended, and innreport(8) can pro­
           duce a nice summary of the timings.  The default value
           is "0".

       System Tuning

       The following parameters can be modified to tune the low-
       level operation of INN.  In general, you shouldn't need to
       modify any of them except possibly rlimitnofile unless the
       server is having difficulty.

           How many read or write failures until a channel is put
           to sleep or closed.  The default value is "5".

       blockbackoff
           Each time an attempted write returns EAGAIN or EWOULD­
           BLOCK, innd(8) will wait for an increasing number of
           seconds before trying it again.  This is the multi­
           plier for the sleep time.  If you're having trouble
           with channel feeds not keeping up, it may be good to
           change this value to "2" or "3", since then when the
           channel fills INN will try again in a couple of sec­
           onds rather than waiting two minutes.  The default
           value is "120".

       chaninacttime
           The time (in seconds) to wait between noticing inac­
           tive channels.  The default value is "600".

       chanretrytime
           How many seconds to wait before a channel restarts.
           The default value is "300".

       icdsynccount
           How many article writes between updating the active
           and history files.  The default value is "10".

       maxforks
           How many times to attempt a fork(2) before giving up.
           The default value is 10.

       nicekids
           If set to anything other than "0", all child processes
           of innd(8) will have this nice(2) value.  This is usu­
           ally used to give all child processes of innd(8) a
           lower priority (higher nice value) so that innd(8) can
           get the lion's share of the CPU when it needs it.  The
           default value is "4".

       nicenewnews
           If set to anything greater than "0", all nnrpd(8) pro­
           cesses that receive and process a NEWNEWS command will
           nice(2) themselves to this value (giving other nnrpd
           processes a higher priority).  The default value is
           "0".  Note that this value will be ignored if set to a
           lower value than nicennrpd (or nicekids if nnrpd(8) is
           spawned from innd(8)).

       nicennrpd
           If set to anything greater than "0", all nnrpd(8) pro­
           cesses will nice(1) themselves to this value.  This
           gives other news processes a higher priority and can
           help overchan(8) keep up with incoming news (if that's
           the object, be sure overchan(8) isn't also set to a

           "0", which will cause nnrpd(8) processes spawned from
           innd(8) to use the value of nicekids and nnrpd(8) run
           as a daemon to use the system default priority.  Note
           that for nnrpd(8) processes spawned from innd(8), this
           value will be ignored if set to a value lower than
           nicekids.

       pauseretrytime
           Wait for this many seconds before noticing inactive
           channels.  The default value is "300".

       peertimeout
           How long (in seconds) an innd(8) incoming channel may
           be inactive before innd closes it.  The default value
           is "3600" (an hour).

       rlimitnofile
           The maximum number of file descriptors that innd(8) or
           innfeed(8) can have open at once.  If innd(8) or
           innfeed(8) attempts to open more file descriptors than
           this value, it is possible the program may throttle or
           otherwise suffer reduced functionality.  The number of
           open file descriptors is roughly the maximum number of
           incoming feeds and outgoing batches for innd(8) and
           the number of outgoing streams for innfeed(8).  If
           this parameter is set to a negative value, the default
           limit of the operating system will be used; this will
           normally be adequate on systems other than Solaris.
           Nearly all operating systems have some hard maximum
           limit beyond which this value cannot be raised, usu­
           ally either 128, 256, or 1024.  The default value of
           this parameter is -1.  Setting it to 256 on Solaris
           systems is highly recommended.

       Paths and File Names

       patharchive
           Where to store archived news.  The default value is
           pathspool/archive.

       patharticles
           The path to where the news articles are stored (for
           storage methods other than CNFS).  The default value
           is pathspool/spool.

       pathbin
           The path to the news binaries.  The default value is
           pathnews/bin.

       pathcontrol
           The path to the files that handle control messages.
           If you are using controlchan(8) (usecontrolchan is

           trol message is located here.  If you are using INN's
           built-in control message handling, each executable
           file in this directory represents a handler for the
           Control: message with the same name as that file.  Be
           very careful what you put in this directory exe­
           cutable, as it can potentially be a severe security
           risk.  The default value is pathbin/control.

       pathdb
           The path to the database files used and updated by the
           server (currently, active, active.times, history and
           its indices, and newsgroups).  The default value is
           pathnews/db.

       pathetc
           The path to the news configuration files.  The default
           value is pathnews/etc.

       pathfilter
           The path to the Perl, Tcl, and Python filters.  The
           default value is pathbin/filter.

       pathhttp
           Where any HTML files (such as periodic status reports)
           are placed.  If the news reports should be available
           in real-time on the web, the files in this directory
           should be served by a web server.  The default value
           is the value of pathlog.

       pathincoming
           Location where incoming batched news is stored.  The
           default value is pathspool/incoming.

       pathlog
           Where the news log files are written.  The default
           value is pathnews/log.

       pathnews
           The home directory of the news user and usually the
           root of the news hierarchy.  There is no default; this
           parameter must be set in inn.conf or INN will refuse
           to start.

       pathoutgoing
           Default location for outgoing feed files.  The default
           value is pathspool/outgoing.

       pathoverview
           The path to news overview files.  The default value is
           pathspool/overview.

       pathrun
           The path to files required while the server is running

           files and the sockets for communicating with innd(8).
           This directory and the control sockets in it should be
           protected from unprivileged users other than the news
           user.  The default value is pathnews/run.

       pathspool
           The root of the news spool hierarchy.  This used
           mostly to set the defaults for other parameters, and
           to determine the path to the backlog directory for
           innfeed(8).  The default value is pathnews/spool.

       pathtmp
           Where INN puts temporary files.  For security reasons,
           this is not the same as the system temporary files
           directory (INN creates a lot of temporary files with
           predictable names and does not go to particularly
           great lengths to protect against symlink attacks and
           the like; this is safe provided that normal users
           can't write into its temporary directory).  It must be
           on the same partition as pathincoming for rnews(1) to
           work correctly.  The default value is set at configure
           time and defaults to pathnews/tmp.


EXAMPLE

       Here is a very minimalist example that only sets those
       parameters that are required.

           mta:                /usr/lib/sendmail -oi -oem %s
           ovmethod:           tradindexed
           pathhost:           news.example.com
           pathnews:           /usr/local/news

       For a more comprehensive example, see the sample inn.conf
       distributed with INN and installed as a starting point; it
       contains all of the default values for reference.


HISTORY

       Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews
       and since modified, updated, and reorganized by innumer­
       able other people.

       $Id: inn.conf.5,v 1.86.2.6 2001/01/16 14:01:33 rra Exp $


SEE ALSO

       inews(1), innd(8), innwatch(8), nnrpd(8), rnews(1).

       Nearly every program in INN uses this file to one degree
       or another.  The above are just the major and most fre­
       quently mentioned ones.


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