INN

In the truest spirit of usenet I actually have zero idea what I'm talking about and am making all this up, but it does seem reasonable and has the added benefint of possibly even beng true.

— Richard Sexton

Description

INN (InterNetNews) is a very full-featured and flexible news server package, originally written by Rich Salz in 1991 as a higher performance alternative to C News. It was then maintained for some time by Dave Barr, then by James Brister, and then by Katsuhiro Kondou and I. I've since had to cut back significantly on the work I do on INN due to lack of time, but other people (particularly Julien ÉLIE) have picked up the slack I left.

The main copyright for INN is held by Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., which gratiously hosts the mailing lists and FTP distribution site for INN. This is not the official home page for INN, but instead is a collection of my personal notes on INN and HTML conversions of INN's documentation.

INN doesn't try to be the fastest possible news server, or the simplest, and it's definitely not the easiest to configure. It does try to be one of the most flexible, as well as acceptably fast for even large sites, and over the years it's been used by many people as a platform for experimentation with new news protocol ideas.

Requirements

INN is written in ANSI C, so it requires a C compiler and a modern operating system that supports ANSI C. gcc will work fine. It also requires Perl, at least version 5.004_03, since many supporting utilities and parts of the build system are written in Perl. To build INN, you also need a reasonably decent make program that supports include; GNU make will do quite well.

For support for authenticated control messages, you need either PGP or GnuPG, the latter being recommended. For embedded filtering and authentication hook support, you need either Perl 5.005 or later (5.8 or later recommended) or Python 1.5.2 or later (2.5 or later recommended), depending on what language you want to write your filters and authentication hooks in.

For the ovdb overview storage method, you'll need Berkeley DB 4.4 or later (4.7 or later recommended). If you have zlib available, you can also compress overview before it's stored into ovdb. For support for news reading over SSL, you'll need OpenSSL. 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 v5 KDC; for this, you will need Kerberos libraries.

Download

The distribution:

• INN 2.5.2 (FTP)
• Older versions (FTP)
• Development snapshots (FTP)
• Testing releases (FTP)

Documentation:

• INN 2.6-to-be documentation
• INN 2.5 documentation
• INN 2.4 documentation
• INN 2.x FAQ
• Ohloh code analysis
• Debian package tracker

Development:

• INN development and bug tracking
• Public read-only Subversion repository

Other links:

• User-contributed add-on software (FTP)

You can check out the public read-only Subversion repository with:

    svn co http://inn.eyrie.org/svn/trunk/

or use branches/2.5 instead of trunk for the 2.5 stable branch.

Debian packages are available from Debian as the inn2 source package. Thanks to Marco d'Itri for maintaining the Debian packages.

License

The majority of INN code is distributed under a simple, permissive free license (with no advertising clause). However, some portions of INN are distributed under other licenses. See the file LICENSE in the distribution for all of the details.