Building a news swerver ?

So work have said that they're no longer supporting nntp.
But I think I can talk them round to me building a box and admin'ing
it possibly.
Do you need owt special ?
I'm thinking a couple of 500GB SATA Drives on an Intel DQ35JOE running
Raid1.
I have no idea of what OS or Applications to use - being a hardware
person.
Any hints - online guides ?

 

http://www.freebsd.org/
http://leafnode.org/
http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/sw/inn/

D.

 

Just for ukrm? Other text groups as well, or the full binary monty? If
the latter then consider multiplying the number of drives, by, er lots.
And a big FO network too

If it were me I'd go for some flavour of Linux, Ubuntu server etc. with
something like maybe leafnode. I could give you a hand setting it up?

Why do you need your own hosted server, the public ones not good enough?

 

What do you mean by a news server? If you want a full on all inclusive
bells and whistles news server my advice would be to avoid.

FWIW, I use leafnode <http://leafnode.sourceforge.net/> and take a feed
and post using the cheesy server[1]. The nice thing is I can tunnel to
my server to read and post no matter where I am.

[1] Which is good enough for me.

 

The second question would be: what business is that of yours?

D.

 

Wow, 5 out of 5 for leafnode, and everyone answered the question posed.
Is that a ukrm first?

<Awaits Cane response with NSW link>

 

Just text groups.
I don't think I can get at other public servers through the firewall.
Its stupid - we're an ISP and own a huge chunk of telehouse, but due
to that business being a seperate business unit even though they're in
our building, I can't get at their nntp server through the firewall,
only the one our Network Services bods have provided on the inside is
viewable.

 

Alarming isn't it?

 

Make that 6 out of 6 (I use leafnode on the server that I'm replying
from) running on linux.

Incredibly easy to set up as long as you are not afraid of command-line
stuff.

And as others have said - you *must* have an upstream server to grab
new news items from (and to post your responses) to. Leafnode allows
you to set up multiple server/port combos for the upstream ones to
allow you a bit of resilience.

Phil

 

I have no idea, you seem to have all the ****ing answers though ?
Like I said - tcp/ports/server stuff/protocols is all black art to me.
Can you please **** off out of the thread and leave the helpful people
behind, please.

Just building a news server to replace the one our NS dept were no
longer going to support seemed like a sensible thing to do, I'm not so
sure now !

 

Why not just tunnel nntp through a port they do allow like 80? Assuming
they don't do inspection and they don't use a proxy you'd be fine.

 

Actually his comment is helpful as it gives you detail of something
you definitely need to consider and work around.

My suggestion however is a bit more of a bypass of most of the
effort... come up with a reason for needing NNTP access "Support
forums" is always a useful one, and just talk to your corporate
firewall chaps about getting a port opened so you can get access
outside your own LAN.

 

Although your NS dept have removed the NNTP server you may still be able
to use the one your upstream ISP provide since you'll be using one of
their IPs. Just a case of looking on their website and seeing if they
provide one.

 

At this point my response would be:

"Pack up your computer and send it back to where you got it from as you
are obviously too stupid to use it".

Then you should either a) give up and go back to counting your toes or
b) learn something.

Your choice.

Well - it's going to involve you *actually* having to learn how do to
something. Which you obviously can't cope with.

Phil

 

Tunnel - Something that goes under ground ?
nntp - Ahh, I recognise that - its a protocol used for news groups.
port - drink / place to dock ships / and something I connect to via a
router on my PC (Guessing the latter).
proxy - yes - we do - with IE I have to configure the proxy name on
port 8080.

 

Ouch! Harsh but fair. I was going to ask if the OP was a receptionist
for their ISP employer.

 

It'd be useful for you to establish whether this is actually the case
or not, since if you do have access to other public servers through the
firewall then you can save yourself a lot of hassle by simply using one.

From a command prompt in Windows, type "telnet news.individual.net
119". If you see a text message that begins something like "200 The
server welcomes..." then you are not firewalled, just use a public news
server.

There's no reason for it to be firewalled other than "we don't want
people wasting their time on usenet", and if they've provided an
internal server for you up to now, then that is probably not the policy.

 

A decent sys admin will notice the the lack of entropy in an outbound
connection using the SSH protocol and would be more likely to block it.
I'd try tunneling via HTTP, failing that DNS (which is very hard to
prevent without potentially breaking their network). The encryption
isn't necessary and only goes to arouse suspicion.

If they allow outbound NNTP connections then the best bet would be to
see if their ISP provider supply an NNTP server and use that.

Google Groups is a good suggestion that I'd overlooked, but I don't know
how long I'd continue using Usenet if I had to use that all the time

 

If you have an upstream news server why bother running a leafnode? In
the past I've only used leafnode where the upstream NNTP server has been
pretty flacky (connection wise) and so it made my reading experience
nicer or where I've used a proper NNTP client that requires a local
feed. In the OP's case I'd say they just want to get up and running as
quickly as possible minimising the amount of gimmicks required.