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Usenet Retention Tests July 2026: How Much of Your Old Download Is Still There?
(usenet.rexum.space)
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INN (short for InterNetNews) is currently the most common newsserver around. And it seems it’s actually comparatively easy to configure for a newsserver. It still is bloody opaque for a newbie though.For the sake of people like me who’d like to peer with someone else but don’t know what to do, here’s how it works:
You need a peer (of course) who let’s you peer with them.
The easy way is to ask on news.admin.peering, people there are generally really helpful to prospective new admins. And mind you, I am not an expert, this is what I found works.Then you will need to add stuff to three files in /etc/news: incoming.conf, innfeed.conf, and newsfeeds.The entry for incoming.conf looks like thisincoming.conf:
peer usenet.example.com {
hostname: usenet.example.com
}The one for infeed.conf looks like that:innfeed.conf:
peer usenet.example.com {
ip-name: usenet.example.com
}Both of which are rather simple. Then comes newsfeeds which gets a bit more complicated:newsfeeds
usenet.example.com/server
:,!local.,@bina,!control,!control.
:Tm,<1000000:innfeed!This is where most of the magic happens: the first star in the second line tells to accept every message from your peer. The !control. takes out all the messages from the control.* hierarchy. The !local does the same for local groups.
The @bina is intended to make all binary groups poison groups, meaning messages will be discarded if they are even just cross-posted to a binary group. Most text-only usenet servers don’t want any binary posts at all, some do allow smaller graphics. None of them want the hassle of dealing with binary groups.The <1000000 tells you how large the messages are allowed to be (in this case for a text server a rather permissive 1mb).
The Tm flags specifies how it the feed is handled , you can read more about flags on the man page. Federation Tag: @usenet
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