What is s-news?
S-news is a simple news server for hosts with one or two users. It is intened to supply spool and offline news reading for a configured selection of newsgroups. S-news does the minimum required to maintain a conventional news spool and makes use of suck for news transport.
Why s-news?
Becasue there was no existing news servers that fit my needs. My requirements are:
- Articles must be provided in the standard /var/spool/news format with .overview files as well as via NNTP.
- The server needs to be fed by pulling news from any number of external news server without using the NNTP NEWNEWS command.
- The nntpd must be able to run from inetd.
- The news server must not try and do anything silly like mirror article numbers from the server the article are pulled from, fetch active or newsgroups files or fetch any groups I've not explicitly told it to.
This only left a combination of suck and c-news. C-news is not really approprate for a small leaf site. Writing s-news looked as if it would be a lot less trouble than getting c-news installed and confiured.
Features
It provdes a NNTP service and /var/spool/news for local news readers.
It supports any number of incoming news feeds via NNTP either by IHAVE
or suck(1).
Outgoing news feeds are made from locally posted articles and reposted
remotly by rpost(1).
It expires articles by how long they have been in the spool.
It has NNTP access configuration to allow and deny read, post and
transfer access to remote hosts.
It is very light weight and relatively easy to configure.
The suck package includes suck(1) and rpost(1).
Limitations
No control messages are processed.
It can not feed another site.
It expects the article reposting to handle newsgroup moderation.
Outoing articles only go to the first matching host in the newfeeds file.
It uses O_EXECL file locking witch is documented as being broken on NFS.
Requirements
To compile s-news you will need a UNIX like OS with dirent. You will also need the gdbm library. For a fully functioning s-news suck is required.
Getting s-news
The latest version of s-news can be found at http://www.lost.org.uk/snews.html
The latest version of suck can be found at http://members.home.net/bobyetman/