inntools

Inntools are a collection of some handy tools I wrote for my private newsserver which is based on INN, suck & rpost.

contents

Have a look at the readme.

usage

mergelist

mergelist merges the lists of descriptions of newsgroups available on serveral remote servers:

$ (getlist -h news.provider1.com newsgroups; getlist -h news.provider2.org newsgroups) | mergelist > /var/lib/news/newsgroups

repost

repost is a dangerous tool. Don't use it! It is meant to walk through /var/spool/news/articles/ and post every encountered file (which is possibly an article) to a given newsserver. It is only useful if your newsserver has died (eg. corrupted history database) and you want to shift all the articles to your new server without polling it from the remote servers.

$ repost /var/spool/news/articles MY.news.server.tld

Imagine what will happen if you have a typo in the hostname above and you repost to a remote server which accepts your articles: The usenet would probably get unusable because you are flooding it with dupes!

rpostfilter

rpostfilter is used in conjunction with rpost: It erases fields in the header of articles that will be posted on a remote newsserver. For example, some German providers do not allow articles to be posted if there is already a NNTP-Posting-Date:-line in the header. So you could start rpost with parameters like the following:

$ rpost news.provider.com -f rpostfilter \$\$o=/tmp/file sm \$\$i /tmp/file NNTP-Posting-Date

rpost would start rpostfilter like the following:

rpostfilter sm @TOKEN@ /tmp/file NNTP-Posting-Date

rpostfilter itself calls sm, the INN storage manager to get the article which the token @TOKEN@ refers to. It would then erase any lines from the header starting with the string NNTP-Posting-Date and finally write the modified article to /tmp/file, which is then read and posted on the remote server by rpost. Of course you can specify more header fields that should be removed:

$ rpost news.provider.com -f rpostfilter \$\$o=/tmp/file sm \$\$i /tmp/file NNTP-Posting-Date Xref X-Trace

But you should never rpostfilter let remove the Message-ID field!
Read the manual pages of suck and rpost carefully.

wishlist

download

inntools.tar.bz2

related topics

my Inn & Suck howto