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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