Active news groups are listed in the ~news/db/active file (could be located in /var/lib/news). Editing this file by hand is not recommended, because of the rather strict syntax.

You can use ctlinnd to create news groups, but only when INN is running. INN will not run unless there are news groups in the active file.

To solve this chicken and egg problem, create an active file with two mandatory groups:

control 0000000000 0000000001 y
junk 0000000000 0000000001 y

Also create active.times in the same directory:

touch active.times

Make sure this file is owned by user news and group news.

If INN was installed from a DEB or RPM packet, there may already be default active and active.times files.

Now when you start INN, you can add newsgroups with the ctlinnd command:

ctlinnd newgroup <group> <flags> <creator>

where:

If you want to create a local group that can be used for testing purposes, you would issue the following command:

ctlinnd newgroup local.testing y ben

This will create a newsgroup called “local.testing” which accepts local posting.

Before we begin, it is worth mentioning the so-called wildmat pattern-matching syntax used in many configuration files. These are simple wildcard matches using the asterisk (“*”) as the wildcard character, much like the simple wildcard expansion used by Unix shells.

In many cases, wildmat patterns can be specified in a comma-separated list to indicate a list of newsgroups. When used in this fashion, each pattern is checked in turn to see if it matches, and the last pattern in the line that matches the group name is used. Patterns beginning with “!” designate groups to exclude based on the pattern match. For example:

comp.*, !comp.os.*, comp.os.linux.*

In this case, we will match everything under comp (“comp.*”), except groups under comp.os (“!comp.os.*”) unless they are under the comp.os.linux hierarchy (“comp.os.linux.*”).

Incoming newsfeeds are configured in incoming.conf. This file should at least contain a default number of max-connections and “peer ME”, which is the entry for the localhost. Without this entry articles will not appear in your spool.

An example incoming.conf file with a newsfeed from your upstream ISP for the comp.* newsgroups will look like this:

max-connections:    8      # per feed

peer ME {
  hostname:         "localhost, 127.0.0.1"
}

peer isp {
  hostname:         news.isp.com
  # accept the comp newsgroups from this host
  patterns:         comp.*
}

If you want to send the local postings to the comp.* newsgroups back to the upstream ISP, you have to set up an outgoing feed in newsfeeds:

news.isp.com:comp.*:Tf:news.isp.com

The flag “Tf” specifies that a file should be written. The name of the file must be unique, and defaults to the hostname of the feed (news.isp.com). Note that this only specifies that a log entry should be written in a file. A separate program, innfeed, will use this file to do the actual feed. This means that innfeed should be configured to read the file and send the articles to the peer. This is done by adding the following entry to the innfeed.conf file:

peer isp {
  hostname:         news.isp.com
}