[Scottish] Local news server

[Colin McKinnon]

On Thursday 19 February 2004 21:18, Ritchie Logan wrote:
>
> I got hold of a Toshiba Magnia SG20 internet appliance, which is
> essentially a legacy free PC running Red Hat 7.3. My intention is, to turn
> this thing on in the evening, and let it "mirror" a number of newsgroups
> for access via clients on the local network during the day. I want
> retention to be about a week.
>

Inn + suck should do the job although I've never tried it myself - always used 
'leafnode' myself, and found it relatively easy to configure and next to zero 
maintainence. It lets you define how long and how much news to keep. Its 
brilliant in a low-bandwidth situation as it only downloads groups which you 
have tried to read (recently).

The only thing I found it didn't do was local newsgroups - but there's a fork 
which now does exactly that.

>
> Can anyone give me a pointer as to what I need to install on it to do the
> job. Hopefully there'll be RPMs available, as I don't think the Toshiba
> "doctored" version of Red Hat has much in the way of development software
> installed.
>
For leafnode, edit the config file and go! You might have to kick your 
newsreader a couple of times before it realises that its talking to a 
different news server with different message IDs, but once that's sorted then 
that's about all you need to do.

If it's still an intel PC then you should just have to compile remotely and 
upload (scp). I see it has a built in HD 
(http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7915816249.html)  You might want to 
think about how to do more general updates - RH 7.3 has just dropped off the 
support charts. Easiest option might be to drop the HD into a PC with a 
CDROM. Can you still get fullsize <-> 2.5 inch IDE cables? 

> I've been on this list for a while, but my experience is pretty limited. I
> run Debian on my "normal" PCs.
>
Why not put Debian on the appliance then?

HTH

Colin