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net news updates | |
September 17th, 2020 | |
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Last year I wrote a guide on how I set up net news (USENET) on | |
Cosmic Voyage [0]. It's designed not to peer with the big USENET, | |
but rather with other tilde servers to make a micro net news | |
network just for us. That post is still valid and if you run | |
a tilde or pubnix and want to peer with cosmic, reach out and let | |
me know. | |
[0] net news on cosmic voyage | |
Since Tilde Club rejoined the fold and has become an active member | |
of the tildeverse, deepend has been good enough to set up a net | |
news node there as well. We ran into some challenges with the | |
peering setup early on due to IPV6, but that's been solved. Now | |
we're growing together and learning new tricks. | |
Tilde Club opened up its access for using net news remotely, not | |
just from the local system [1]. If you want to jump into the | |
conversation now and aren't on Cosmic or Club, you can follow the | |
instructions there to do so. | |
[1] usenet news via tilde.club | |
User xwindows was chatting with me today about a mission to fix | |
the few problems we have remaining on the network. Perhaps the | |
most important is the expiration of old messages. As of this phlog | |
Club is set to expire net news messages after only 15 days. | |
Hopefully that will be rectified in the next few days, but also | |
we're working on a way to suck in all the old posts off cosmic to | |
refill the system. Cosmic's posts are set to expire after 1 year, | |
so it has much more post data to share with the rest of the | |
network. Today's immediate challenge was that cosmic didn't have | |
a method to view that data from outside cosmic itself. Unlike Club | |
I hadn't set up external access. | |
With a bit of investigation and some trial & error that has been | |
fixed. If you connect to cosmic.voyage from an external net news | |
client you can get a read-only view of everything on the system. | |
The only change required to make this happen was in | |
'readers.conf': | |
# auth blocks match whichever group succeeds LAST | |
# so having the local group below the wildcard | |
# is important | |
auth "default" { | |
hosts: "*" | |
default: "anonymous" | |
} | |
auth "localhost" { | |
hosts: "localhost, 127.0.0.1, ::1, stdin" | |
default: "<localhost>" | |
} | |
access regular { | |
read: "*,!junk,!control,!control.*" | |
} | |
access full { | |
users: "*,!anonymous" | |
newsgroups: "*,!junk,!control,!control.*" | |
} | |
access "localhost" { | |
users: "<localhost>" | |
newsgroups: "*,!junk,!control,!control.*" | |
access: RPA | |
} | |
The first two blocks handle local access which is basically saying | |
if you're on cosmic you're good to go. Post away. Otherwise read. | |
The three blocks following set up a two-case scenario for everyone | |
else. If you connect and successfully auth your user will be set | |
to whatever your username is. If not, you get the default name | |
"anonymous". Then I have a blanket rule for everyone to be able to | |
read everything, and finally a special rule for everyone not named | |
anonymous allowing posting. | |
So far testing seems to be working alright! | |
Oh, and one last thing... If you want to make sure your expiration | |
settings are nice and long (say... several years) then you only | |
need to change a few config lines: | |
# expire.ctl | |
*:A:365:1095:never | |
# innreport.conf | |
cycle 365; | |
# inn.conf | |
artcutoff: 365 |