Our main branch is for the current development of the next INN 2.8 major release. Head to the 2.7 branch for the maintenance of the most recently released stable version.
This code is under active development and may or may not be stable at any given time. Contributions and bug reports are welcome and encouraged.
This work is sponsored by Internet Systems Consortium.
The official homepage of the project is https://www.isc.org/othersoftware/.
You'll also find very useful information about INN on Russ Allbery's web site.
Please see:
CHECKLIST for a quick overview of all the installation steps and pointers to documentation,
INSTALL for full installation instructions,
FAQ for INN FAQ,
NEWS for what's changed from the previous release,
and LICENSE for the copyright, license, and distribution terms.
These files can also be found in the doc or doc/pod directories if not present at top-level.
INN (InterNetNews), originally written by Rich Salz, is a very full-featured and extremely flexible and configurable Usenet / Netnews news server. For a complete description of the protocols behind Usenet and Netnews, see RFC 3977 (NNTP), RFC 4642 updated by RFC 8143 (TLS/NNTP), RFC 4643 (NNTP authentication), RFC 4644 (streaming NNTP feeds), RFC 5536 (USEFOR), RFC 5537 (USEPRO), RFC 6048 (NNTP LIST additions), RFC 8054 (NNTP compression) and RFC 8315 (Cancel-Lock) or their replacements.
In brief, Netnews is a set of protocols for exchanging messages between a decentralized network of news servers. News articles are organized into newsgroups, which are themselves organized into hierarchies. Each individual news server stores locally all articles it has received for a given newsgroup, making access to stored articles extremely fast. Netnews does not require any central server; instead, each news server passes along articles it receives to all of the news servers it peers with, those servers pass the articles along to their peers, and so on, resulting in "flood fill" propagation of news articles.
A news server performs three basic functions: it accepts articles from other servers and stores them on disk, sends articles it has received out to other servers, and offers stored news articles to readers on demand. It additionally has to perform some periodic maintenance tasks, such as deleting older articles to make room for new ones.
Originally, a news server would just store all of the news articles it had received in a file system. Users could then read news by reading the article files on disk (or more commonly using news reading software that did this efficiently). These days, news servers are almost always stand-alone systems and news reading is supported via network connections. A user who wants to read a newsgroup opens that newsgroup in their newsreader software, which opens a network connection to the news server and sends requests for articles and related information. The protocol that a newsreader uses to talk to a news server and that a news server uses to talk to another news server over TCP/IP is called NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol).
INN supports accepting articles via either NNTP connections or via UUCP. innd, the heart of INN, handles NNTP feeding connections directly; UUCP newsfeeds use rnews (included in INN) to hand articles off to innd. Other parts of INN handle feeding articles out to other news servers, most commonly innfeed (for real-time outgoing feeds) or nntpsend and innxmit (used to send batches of news created by innd to a remote site via TCP/IP). INN can also handle outgoing UUCP feeds.
The part of INN that handles connections from newsreaders is nnrpd.
Also included in INN are a wide variety of supporting programs to handle periodic maintenance and recovery from crashes, process special control messages, maintain the list of active newsgroups, and generate and record a staggering variety of statistics and summary information on the usage and performance of the server.
INN also supports an extremely powerful filtering system that allows the server administrator to reject unwanted articles (such as spam and other abuses of Usenet).
INN is free software, supported by Internet Systems Consortium and volunteers around the world. See "Supporting the INN Effort" below.
Compiling INN requires an ANSI C compiler (gcc is recommended). INN was originally written in K&R C, but supporting pre-ANSI compilers has become enough of a headache that a lot of the newer parts of INN will no longer compile with a non-ANSI compiler. gcc itself will compile with most vendor non-ANSI compilers, however, so if you're stuck with one, installing gcc is highly recommended. Not only will it let you build INN, it will make installing lots of other software much easier. You may also need GNU make (particularly if your system make is BSD-derived), although most SysV make programs should work fine. Compiling INN also currently requires a yacc implementation (bison will do fine).
INN uses GNU autoconf to probe the capabilities of your system, and therefore should compile on nearly any Unix system. It does, however, make extensive use of mmap(), which can cause problems on some older operating systems. See INSTALL for a list of systems it is known to work on. If you encounter problems compiling or running INN, or if you successfully run INN on a platform that isn't listed in INSTALL, please let us know (see "Reporting Bugs" below).
Perl 5.8.0 or later is required to build INN, run several subsystems, and use the embedded Perl filtering and authentication hook support (which is highly recommended; some excellent spam filters have been written for INN). Depending on what language you want to write your filters and authentication hooks in, you may also want to install Python 2.3.0 or later, or Python 3.3.0 or later.
For support for authenticated control messages, you will need either PGP or GnuPG, the latter being recommended. See INSTALL for more details.
For the ovdb overview storage method, you'll need Berkeley DB 4.4 or later (4.7 or later recommended). For the ovsqlite overview storage method, you'll need SQLite 3.8.2 or later (3.20.0 or later recommended). If you have zlib available, you can also compress overview before it's stored into ovdb or ovsqlite, and enable the COMPRESS capability, an NNTP extension. For support for news reading over TLS, you'll need OpenSSL or LibreSSL. To support SASL authentication to nnrpd or to feed newsgroups to an IMAP server with SASL authentication, you'll need the Cyrus SASL libraries. INN can also check passwords against a Kerberos KDC; for this, you will need Kerberos libraries.
A news server can be a fairly complicated piece of software to set up just because of the wide variety of pieces that have to be configured (who is authorized to read from the server, what newsgroups it carries, and how the articles are stored on disk at a bare minimum, and if the server isn't completely stand-alone -- and very few servers are -- both incoming and outgoing feeds have to be set up and tested). Be prepared to take some time to understand what's going on and how all the pieces fit together. If you have any specific suggestions for documentation, or comments about things that are unclear, please send them to the INN maintainers (see "Reporting Bugs" below).
Source code tarballs of the official releases can be downloaded from https://downloads.isc.org/isc/inn/. The InterNetNews project does not distribute releases in binary form. Yet, precompiled versions may exist on your operating system.
When installing a new INN server, you may wish to download the latest snapshot of the stable branch rather than the last official release, so that to pick up possible bug fixes.
See INSTALL for step-by-step instructions for setting up and configuring a news server.
If you want to create a Docker image, you can find examples of standard local Docker containers or GitHub Actions services in projects like apt-get-inn2-docker or inn-docker.
INN also comes with a very complete set of man pages; there is a man page for every configuration file and program that comes with INN. (If you find one that doesn't have a man page, that's a bug. Please do report it.) When trying to figure out some specific problem, reading the man pages for all of the configuration files involved is a very good start.
URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/docs/ (online documentation)
We're interested in all bug reports. Not just on the programs, but on the documentation too. Please use the GitHub issue tracker to send such bug reports, or alternatively send them to
(patches are certainly welcome, see below). Even if you post to Usenet, please CC the above address.
If you have general "how do I do this" questions or problems configuring your server that you don't believe are due to a bug in INN, you should post them to news.software.nntp. A lot of experienced INN users, including several of the INN maintainers, read that newsgroup regularly. Please don't send general questions to the above addresses; those addresses are specifically for INN, and the INN maintainers usually won't have time to answer general questions.
INN is maintained using the Git version control system. The official InterNetNews Git repository is located at https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn. A local copy of the current development source can be obtained by cloning it using a Git client:
git clone https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn.gitYou can also download daily snapshots produced only if the current code compiles and passes the test suite, so they have undergone at least some basic validation, although they've not been tested by a human.
If you have a patch or a utility that you'd like to be considered for inclusion into INN, please make a GitHub pull request, or alternatively mail it to
in the body of the message (not as an attachment because the mailing-list might strip it), or put it on a webpage and send a link. Patches included with a bug report as described above should follow the same procedure.
Please submit all patches against the current main branch, not against a stable release. The development version of INN is often much different than the last stable release.
Also please take a look at HACKING for information about development and coding style.
Have fun!
There are various INN-related mailing lists you can join or send messages to if you like. Some of them you must be a member of before you can send mail to them (thank the spammers for that policy), and one of them is read-only (no postings allowed).
- [email protected]
-
Where announcements about INN are sent (only maintainers may post).
- [email protected]
-
Discussion of INN development. If you prefer not to use GitHub to create an issue or a pull request, it is also where to send bug reports and patches for consideration for inclusion into INN (postings by members only). If you're an INN expert and have the time to help out other users, we encourage you to join this mailing list to answer questions. (You may also want to read the newsgroup news.software.nntp, which gets a lot of INN-related questions.)
- [email protected]
-
Git commit messages for INN are sent to this list (only the automated messages are sent here, no regular posting).
- [email protected]
-
This list used to receive Trac issues for INN, before the migration to GitHub (only the automated messages were sent here, no regular posting). Bug reports should be sent to the inn-workers mailing list, or a GitHub issue created.
To join these lists, send a subscription request to the -request address. The addresses for the above lists are:
You can alternatively join them from the subscription form in their public web pages.
See CONTRIBUTORS for a long list of past contributors as well as people from the inn-workers mailing list who have dedicated a lot of time and effort to getting this new version together. They deserve a big round of applause. They've certainly got our thanks.
This product includes software developed by UUNET Technologies, Inc. and by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
Last, but certainly not least, Rich Salz, the original author of INN deserves a lion's share of the credit for writing INN in the first place and making it the most popular news server software on the planet (no NNTP yet to the moon, but we plan to be there first).
INN users may also be interested in the following software packages that work with INN or are based on it. Please note that none of this software is developed or maintained by ISC; we don't support it and generally can't answer questions about it.
- Cleanfeed
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URL: https://www.mixmin.net/cleanfeed/ (maintained by Steve Crook)
Cleanfeed is an extremely powerful spam filter, probably the most widely used spam filter on Usenet currently. It catches excessive multiposting and a host of other things, and is highly configurable. Note that it requires that INN be built with Perl support (the --with-perl option to configure).
Cleanfeed was originally developed by Jeremy Nixon who maintained it until 1998. Then Marco d'Itri until 2002. Steve Crook has been maintaining it since 2007.
A Python-based variant of Cleanfeed, named PyClean, also exists and can be found at https://github.com/crooks/PyClean.
- GUP (Group Update Program)
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URL: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gup
GUP provides a way for your peers to update their newsfeeds entries as they want without having to ask you to edit the configuration file all the time. It's useful when feeding peers take limited and very specific feeds that change periodically.
- innduct
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URL: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~ian/git-manpage/innduct.git/innduct.8 (maintained by Ian Jackson)
A possible replacement for innfeed, innxmit and nntpsend that quickly and reliably streams Usenet article to a remote site. innduct is designed to be robust and not to lose any articles (when offered to peers) in case it unexpectedly dies, contrary to innfeed. It also permits a realtime feed, contrary to innxmit or nntpsend.
- NewsPortal
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URL: https://gitlab.com/yamo-nntp/newsportal
A PHP-based web news reader that works as a front-end to a regular news server such as INN and lets people read and post without learning a news reader.
NewsPortal was originally written by Florian Amrhein https://amrhein.eu/newsportal/doc/ and is now maintained by Stéphane Grégoire who notably did a great job fixing a few bugs and adapting it for use on smartphones.
- PersonalINN
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URL: http://www.ritual.org/summer/pinn/
PersonalINN is a version of INN modified for personal use and with a friendly GUI built on top of it. It is available for NEXTSTEP or OPENSTEP only, unfortunately.
- suck
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URL: https://github.com/lazarus-pkgs/suck
suck is a separate package for downloading a news feed via a reading connection (rather than via a direct NNTP or UUCP feed) and sending outgoing local posts via POST. It's intended primarily for personal or small-organization news servers who get their news via an ISP and are too small to warrant setting up a regular news feed.
Note that INN is supported by Internet Systems Consortium, and although it is free for use and redistribution and incorporation into vendor products and export and anything else you can think of, it costs money to produce. That money comes from ISPs, hardware and software vendors, companies who make extensive use of the software, and generally kind-hearted folk such as yourself.
Internet Systems Consortium has also commissioned a DHCP server implementation and handles the official support/release of BIND. You can learn more about the ISC's goals and accomplishments from the web page at https://www.isc.org/.
Russ Allbery
Katsuhiro Kondou
<[email protected]>