[Gllug] leafnode and user news

[itsbruce at uklinux.net]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 09:24:21AM +0100, john gennard wrote:
> Leafnode should be run as root or news ( which effectively means as 
> news ), and here I come up against something I've never understood.
> Documentation does not say what kind of user news should be.
> I already have news UID 9, but don't see how I can use this.
> 
> Would someone help me by giving information on the following:-
> 
> a. How exactly do I create the user needed ( an actual commandline
>     example would be appreciated )
> b. How do I get access to that user.

You don't access the user.  The existing news user is the right one.
Leafnode is run by the inetd (or xinetd) daemon, which itself runs as
root.  Root has the ability to become any other user without requiring a
password (handy, since the news accout has no valid password).  If the
entry for a specific service specifies a user, inetd launches it as that
user.

You never run leafnode yourself.  You configure inetd or xinetd
(whichever is installed) to run leafnode whenever someone connects to
port 119.

> c. Leafnode is effectively three programs - leafnode, fetchnews and  
>    texpire. Would the first acton be to run 'leafnode LIST' or do I 
>    use 'fetchnews'.

Having properly configured leafnode, you should run fetchnews so it can
download the list of groups available on the remote news server(s).
Then you simply schedule fetchnews to run at regular intervals.  If
someone tries to look at a particular newsgroup, leafnode creates it
locally and puts a single placeholder message in it.  Fetching that post
adds that group to the list of groups that fetchnews should collect.  So
if they check back in a while, the scheduled fetchnews should have
collected all the posts on the remote server for that group.

> 
> Trying to get to grips with this problem, I installed knode so that 
> I could see what configuration it did. I could not get get the group 
> descriptions to even start. After downloading 3.36Mb, the program 
> cut out with an error message '501 - bad command usage' -this it did
> on each of three attempts. As I had followed the GUI requirements I 
> did not understand this.

Did you configure knode to read from the local box running leafnode or
from your isp's news server?  Maybe understanding the sequence described
above will help you make it work this time.

> 
> As asides does anyone know if a GUI for leafnode has yet been 
> written and is there any preferred reader for use with leafnode.

There is a web-based admin package for leafnode called leafwa.  However,
it requires a webserver and php to be installed and properly configured,
so this may not be much help to you.

http://www.comuno.freeserve.co.uk/oss/leafwa/intro.html

-- 
Bruce

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