DESCRIPTION
inn.conf in pathetc is the primary general configuration file for all
InterNetNews programs. Settings which control 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.
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 configuration file, inn.conf cannot be reloaded
dynamically using ctlinnd(8); innd(8) must be stopped and restarted for
relevant changes to inn.conf to take effect ("ctlinnd xexec innd" is
the fastest way to do this.)
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.)
If the value contains embedded whitespace or any of the characers
"[]<""\:>, it must be enclosed in double quotes (""). A backslash
("\") can be used to escape quotes and backslashes inside double
quotes. <name> is case-sensitive; "server" is not the same as "Server"
or "SERVER". (inn.conf parameters 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 parame-
ter.
Many parameters take a boolean value. For all such parameters, 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 significant.
This documentation is extremely long and organized as a reference man-
ual rather than as a tutorial. If this is your first exposure to INN
and these parameters, it would be better to start by reading other man
pages and referring to this one only when an inn.conf parameter is
explicitly mentioned. Those parameters which need to be changed when
setting up a new server are discussed in INSTALL.
PARAMETERS
General Settings
These parameters are used by a wide variety of different components of
INN.
domain
mailcmd
The path to the program to be used for mailing reports and control
messages. The default is pathbin/innmail. This should not nor-
mally 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: head-
ers of the message, since the latter 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 articles that pass through
the system, including locally posted articles, and is also used
when processing 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, over-
rides this. The default value is unset.
Feed Configuration
These parameters govern incoming and outgoing feeds: what size of
articles are accepted, what filtering and verification 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
value is unset.
Note that you will generally need to put double quotes ("") around
this value if you set it, since IPv6 addresses contain colons.
hiscachesize
If set to a value other than 0, a hash of recently received message
IDs is kept in memory to speed history 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 necessarily 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.
ignorenewsgroups
Whether newsgroup creation control messages (newgroup and rmgroup)
should be fed as if they were posted to the newsgroup they are cre-
ating or deleting rather than to the newsgroups listed in the News-
groups: header. If this parameter is set, the newsgroup affected
by the control message will be extracted from the Control: 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 news-
feeds. 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 cancelled immediately. If this is
set to true, they will instead by cancelled as soon as the cancel
is processed. 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 reasonable setting is 5, which is the standard maximum
signature length plus one (some injection software calculates the
Lines: header before adding the signature). The default value is
0, which tells INN not to check the Lines: header of incoming arti-
cles.
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, but note that innd will crash if system memory is
exceeded. The default value is 1000000 (approximately 1 MB). See
also localmaxartsize.
cancel. This is a boolean value and the default is based on
whether configure found pgp, pgpv, or gpgv.
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 "<can-
cel.". This message ID convention is widely followed by spam can-
cellers, so the vast majority of such articles will be cancels of
spam. This check, if enabled, is done before the history check and
the message 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 mes-
sage IDs can be done via the embedded filtering support.
remembertrash
By default, innd(8) records rejected articles in history so that,
if offered the same article again, it can be refused before it is
sent. If you wish to disable this behavior, set this to false.
This can cause a substantial increase in the amount of bandwidth
consumed 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, but not innfeed(8) -- see
bindaddress in innfeed.conf(5) for that). 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. The default value is unset.
sourceaddress6
Like sourceaddress but for IPv6 sockets.
verifycancels
Set this to true to enable a simplistic check on all cancel mes-
sages, 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
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.
dontrejectfiltered
Normally innd(8) rejects incoming articles when directed to do so
by any enabled article filters (Perl, Python, and TCL). However,
this parameter causes such articles not to be rejected; instead
filtering can be applied on outbound articles. If this parameter
is set, all articles will be accepted on the local machine, but
articles rejected by the filter will not be fed to any peers speci-
fied in newsfeeds with the "Af" flag.
Article Storage
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 maxartsize 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 affects 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 pseudonews-
group "to". If this is set to true, the newsgroup "to" must exist
in the active file or INN will not start. (See the discussion of
"to." groups in innd(8) under CONTROL MESSAGES.) This is a
default value is 15 (which is probably way too low if you have a
large number of file descriptors available).
This setting is ignored unless ovmethod is set to "tradindexed".
ovgrouppat
If set, restricts the overview data stored by INN to only the news-
groups 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
newsgroups does not have self-expire functionality, storing over-
view data will fail. The default is unset.
ovmethod
Which overview storage method to use. Currently supported 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.
hismethod
Which history storage method to use. The only currently supported
value is "hisv6". There is no default value; this parameter must
be set.
"hisv6"
Stores history data in the INN history v6 format: history(5)
text file and a number of dbz(3) database files; this may be in
true history v6 format, or tagged hash format, depending on the
build options. Separation of these two is a project which has
not yet been undertaken.
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 pri-
mary interesting effect of setting this to true is to enable filing
of all control messages according to what storage class the control
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 begin-
ning of lines doubled, the article format required by the NNTP pro-
tocol. 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 gener-
ally only have one upstream feed, and should always have nnr-
pdposthost set to hand locally posted articles off to the master
server. The upstream should be careful to always feed articles in
order (innfeed(8) can have problems with this in the event of a
backlog). This is a boolean value and the default is false.
nfswriter
For servers writing articles, determine whether the article spool
is on NFS storage. If set, INN attempts to flush articles to the
spool in a more timely manner, rather than relying on the operating
system to flush things such as the CNFS article bitmaps. You
should only set this parameter if you are attempting to use a
shared NFS spool on a machine acting as a single writer within a
cluster. This is a boolean value and the default is false.
nfsreader
For servers reading articles, determine whether the article spool
is on NFS storage. If set, INN will attempt to force articles and
overviews to be read directly from the NFS spool rather than from
cached copies. You should only set this parameter if you are
attempting to use a shared NFS spool on a machine acting a reader a
cluster. This is a boolean value and the default is false.
nfsreaderdelay
For servers reading articles, determine whether the article spool
is on NFS storage. If nfsreader is set, INN will use the value of
nfsreaderdelay to delay the apparent arrival time of articles to
clients by this amount; this value should be tuned based on the NFS
cache timeouts locally. This default is 60 (1 minute).
This is a boolean value and the default is true.
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 com-
mand used to put a heavy load on the server in older versions of
INN, but is now reasonably efficient, at least if only one news-
group is specified by the client. This is a boolean value and the
default is true. If you use the access parameter in readers.conf,
be sure to read about the way it overrides allownewnews.
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 is set to false, articles will be
read into memory 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 connec-
tions, it may be a good idea to increase this value to 3600 (an
hour). The default value is 600 (ten minutes).
initialtimeout
How long (in seconds) nnrpd will wait for the first command from a
reader connection before dropping the connection. This is a defen-
sive timeout intended to protect the news server from badly behaved
reader clients that open and abandon a multitude of connections
without every closing them. The default value is 10 (ten seconds),
which may need to be increased if many clients connect via slow
network links.
nnrpdcheckart
Whether nnrpd should check the existence of an article before list-
ing it as present in response to an NNTP command. The primary use
of this setting is to prevent nnrpd from returning information
about articles 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 over-
view commands, but reduces the number of "article is missing"
errors seen by the client. This is a boolean value and the default
is true.
daemon mode or being started out of inetd. This is a boolean value
and the default is false.
readerswhenstopped
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 behavior. Tracked
information is recorded to pathlog/tracklogs/log-ID, where ID is
determined by nnrpd's PID and launch time.) Currently the informa-
tion recorded includes initial connection and posting; only infor-
mation about clients listed in nnrpd.track is recorded. This is a
boolean value and the default is false.
nnrpdloadlimit
If set to a value other than 0, connections to nnrpd will be
refused if the system load average is higher than this value. The
default value is 16.
INN has optional support for generating keyword information automati-
cally from article body text and putting that information in overview
for the use of clients that know to look for it. The following parame-
ters 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 mentioned 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 100 KB).
keylimit
Maximum number of bytes allocated for keyword data. If there are
more keywords than will fit into this many bytes when separated by
commas, the rest are discarded. The default value is 512.
keymaxwords
Whether to add an NNTP-Posting-Date: header to all local posts.
This is a boolean value and the default is true. Note that INN
either does not add this header or adds the name or IP address of
the client. There is no intrinsic support for obfuscating the name
of the client. That has to be done with a user-written Perl fil-
ter, if desired.
addnntppostinghost
Whether to add an NNTP-Posting-Host: header to all local posts giv-
ing the FQDN or IP address of the system 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 rec-
ognized 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 newsmas-
ter, 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 newsmaster 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. A value of 0 allows
any size of article, but note that nnrpd and innd will crash if
system memory is exceeded. See also maxartsize, which applies to
all articles including those posted locally. The default value is
1000000 (approximately 1 MB).
moderatormailer
The address to which to send submissions for moderated groups. It
is only used if the moderators file doesn't exist, or if the moder-
ated group to which an 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 news-
group name). See moderators(5) for more details about the syntax.
The default is unset. If this parameter isn't set and an article
If set, nnrpd(8) and rnews(1) will pass all locally posted articles
to the specified host rather than trying to inject them locally.
See also nnrpdpostport. 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 nnr-
pdposthost 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 trying 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 local posts
via nnrpd(8). The primary purpose of this 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 expo-
nential backoff algorithm, as configured by the following parameters.
Exponential posting backoff works as follows: News clients are indexed
by IP address (or username, see backoffauth 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 post-
ing backoff and begin to sleep for increasing periods of time before
actually posting anything. Posts will still be accepted, but at an
increasingly reduced rate.
After backoff has been activated, the length of time to sleep is com-
puted based on the difference in time between the last posting and the
current posting. If this difference is less than backoffpostfast, the
new sleep time will be 1 + (previous sleep time * backoffk). If this
difference is less than backoffpostslow but greater than backoffpost-
default is false.
backoffdb
The path to a directory, writeable by the news user, that will con-
tain the backoff database. There is no default for this parameter;
you must provide a path to a creatable or writeable directory to
enable exponential 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 constant is to realize that posters
will be allowed to generate at most 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 administrator 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 (normally
kilobytes), at which innd(8) will be throttled by innwatch(8),
assuming a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is 800.
innwatchlibspace
Free space in pathdb, in inndf(8) output units (normally kilo-
bytes), at which innd(8) will be throttled by innwatch(8), assuming
a default innwatch.ctl. The default value is 25000.
innwatchloload
Load average times 100 at which innd(8) will be restarted by
innwatch(8) (undoing a previous pause or throttle), assuming a
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. The default value is
200.
innwatchspoolspace
Free space in patharticles and pathoverview, in inndf(8) output
units (normally kilobytes), at which innd(8) will be throttled by
innwatch(8), assuming a default innwatch.ctl. 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 (frequency is the default for "cnfsstat -l", currently 600
seconds). 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 compressed copies of this many
days worth of old logs. The default value is 3.
logipaddr
Whether the verified name of the remote feeding host should be
logged to the article log for incoming articles 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 articles 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.
nntplink) in the article log. This is a boolean value and the
default is false.
stathist
Where to write history statistics for analysis with con-
trib/stathist.pl; this can be modified with ctlinnd(8) while innd
is running. Logging does not occur unless a path is given, and
there is no default value.
status
How frequently (in seconds) innd(8) should write out a status
report. The report is written to pathhttp/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 performance tim-
ings to syslog. If this is set to 0, performance timing is dis-
abled. Enabling this is highly recommended, and innreport(8) can
produce a nice summary of the timings. If set to 0, performance
timings in nnrpd(8) are also disabled, although nnrpd always
reports statistics on exit and therefore any non-zero value is
equivalent for it. The default value is 0.
System Tuning
The following parameters can be modified to tune the low-level opera-
tion of INN. In general, you shouldn't need to modify any of them
except possibly rlimitnofile unless the server is having difficulty.
badiocount
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 EWOULDBLOCK, innd(8)
will wait for an increasing number of seconds before trying it
again. This is the multiplier for the sleep time. If you're hav-
ing 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 seconds rather than waiting two min-
utes. The default value is 120.
chaninacttime
The time (in seconds) to wait between noticing inactive channels.
The default value is 600.
chanretrytime
How many seconds to wait before a channel restarts. The default
value is 300.
datamovethreshold
data blocks which include requested overview data for newsgroup.
But for high volume newsgroups like control.cancel, this may cause
too much mmapping at once leading to system resource problems. To
avoid this, if the amount to be mmapped exceeds keepmmappedthresh-
old (in KB), buffindexed mmap's just one overview block (8 KB).
This parameter is specific to buffindexed overview storage method.
The default value is 1024 (1 MB).
maxcmdreadsize
If set to anything other than 0, maximum buffer size (in bytes) for
reading NNTP command will have this value. It should not be large
on systems which are slow to process and store articles, as that
would lead to innd(8) spending a long time on each channel and
keeping other channels waiting. The default value is BUFSIZ
defined in stdio.h (1024 in most environments, see setbuf(3)).
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 usually 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) processes 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) processes 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
lower priority via nicekids). The default value is 0, which will
cause nnrpd(8) processes spawned from innd(8) to use the value of
nicekids, while nnrpd(8) run as a daemon will 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. Wait
for this many seconds before innd processes articles when it's
paused or the number of channel write failures exceeds badiocount.
The default value is 300.
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, usually 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/ar-
chive.
patharticles
The path to where the news articles are stored (for storage methods
other than CNFS). The default value is pathspool/articles.
pathbin
The path to the news binaries. The default value is pathnews/bin.
pathcontrol
The path to the files that handle control messages. The code for
handling each separate type of control message is located here. Be
very careful what you put in this directory with a name ending in
".pl", 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 (cur-
rently, active, active.times, history and its indices, and news-
groups). 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 path-
pathrun
The path to files required while the server is running and run-time
state information. This includes lock 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 path-
news/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 par-
ticularly great lengths to protect against symlink attacks and the
like; this is safe provided that normal users can't write into its
temporary directory). 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
hismethod: hisv6
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 innumerable other people.
$Id: inn.conf.5 7471 2005-12-15 04:53:16Z eagle $
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 frequently mentioned ones.
INN 2.4.3 2005-12-14 INN.CONF(5)
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