Leafnode FAQ

This most frequently seems to happen on Linux. The reason is that Leafnode depends on some system-specific information which is usually included in the sources of the kernel.

Unfortunately, nowadays many Linux distribution do not install kernel sources by default; therefore, compilation of Leafnode (and most other programs as well) will fail. The obvious solution is to install the kernel sources. If compilation still does not work afterwards, complain to your distributor. On Linux, if the kernel sources are installed in /usr/src/linux-a.b.cc (with a.b.cc being the version number of your kernel), create a symlink to /usr/src/linux.

There is a separate documentation file dedicated to this issue, how to obtain a hostname, and how to tell leafnode about it. Please see README-FQDN or README-FQDN.html for details.

Leafnode 1.x does not support local newsgroups. Leafnode 2.x will do that.

Netscape Communicator, Mozilla and derived products (Beonex) will by default generate the Message-ID from the domain part of your E-Mail address. However, if your address is that of a big freemailer site (hotmail.com, yahoo.com, gmx.de), this will lead to invalid Message-IDs.

To work around this, go to the Mail & Newsgroups settings and enclose your E-Mail addresses into double quote marks, like this:

"matthias.andree@gmx.de"

You may not have configured inetd or xinetd properly, or the corresponding super server is not running. Please review the installation instructions.

To test the setup, try: telnet localhost 119. Leafnode should then reply with

200 Leafnode NNTP Daemon, version 1.9.27.rel running at merlin.emma.line.org (my fqdn: merlin.emma.line.org)

You are connecting from outside the same networks that your leafnode server is in. Leafnode by default refuses connections from outside your LAN to prevent your leafnode server from abuse should you forget to configure tcpd or make a mistake when writing your hosts.allow or hosts.deny files. Please see /etc/leafnode/config.example for the allowstrangers option and how to configure this option. You will have to change the capitalization and write a special number on that line as you put it into your /etc/leafnode/config.

• You did not read any pseudo articles with your news reader. Subscribe to some groups, enter them and read the leafnode placeholder article.

• Your groupinfo file may be corrupt. Run fetchnews -f.

• /var/spool/news may have wrong permissions. /var/spool/news and all its subdirectories should be owned by user and group news and have permissions drwxrwsr-x (02755).

Maybe your upstream server supports neither the XGTITLE news.group.name nor the LIST NEWSGROUPS news.group.name command.

In this case, add nodesc = 1 to the server entry in /etc/leafnode/config, as described in the leafnode(8) manual page and the /etc/leafnode/config.example file.

An article that causes the interruption may contain three plus signs in a row ("+++"), which many modems interpret as the beginning of a command. You can change or disable this "escape" sequence. Consult your modem's manual, register S2 is a common place to configure this.

For security reasons, this is not possible.

However, there is a tool named "sudo" that allows a regular, unprivileged user to impersonate another user, and this can be used to enable a regular user to run fetchnews.

"sudo" is available from http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/.

If "sudo" is installed on your system, then run visudo as root and add this line:

username ALL = (news) NOPASSWD: /path/to/fetchnews

Now, the user who has been enabled access to fetchnews can just type sudo -u news /path/to/fetchnews to run fetchnews.

Your news reader talks to leafnode via the NNTP protocol. This protocol provides no means for Leafnode to determine which newsgroups you are actually subscribe. Therefore, Leafnode assumes that a newsgroup that is not read for a certain time (which can be configured with the timeout_long parameter) is unsubscribed and will only stop retrieving articles in it after this time.

If you are impatient and want to stop retrieving articles from that group immediately, delete the corresponding file in the /var/spool/news/interesting.groups/ directory. The articles that are already in your spool are still subject to the regular texpire schedule, however.

The backup software that you are using may not reset the atime after reading a file. Check if you can reconfigure it to reset the "atime".

As a workaround, run texpire -f. This will expire articles somewhat earlier because expiry is then determined from the time the file was last modified, rather than when it was last accessed.

Run fetchnews -n rather than just fetchnews.

To search news, older versions of Netscape needed a news server which supports the XPAT command. Leafnode-1 does not. If you want to use Netscape, you have to upgrade to version 4.5 and press the "options" button which appears in the "search messages" window. In the box which appears you have to select "on your local system".

This can be caused by a corrupted inbox file in Outlook Express. It is said to happen during the initial install of Internet Explorer. To fix this problem, go to "Add/Remove Programs", choose "Internet Explorer", then "Repair installation."

Thanks to Jim Gifford who talked to Microsoft to find this solution.

Either you have started the wrong version of tin (the one which tries to read news directly from the spool) or your groupinfo file is corrupt.

In the first case, simply invoke tin with the -r flag: tin -r. If this does not help, try to rebuild the groupinfo file by running fetchnews -f.

There are several reasons:

• Originally, Arnt Gulbrandsen licensed Leafnode under his own license:

  Use, modification and distribution is allowed without limitation, warranty, or liability of any kind.

  This license is very broad. The same spirit is (in my opinion) contained in the X11 license, which is used by Leafnode nowadays.
  
  

• I (Cornelius) do not like the philosophy of the FSF. They seem to emphasize that every project they conceived is good whereas everything else is bad. If they cannot argue the software away this way, they claim it to be part of the project, such as calling Linux "GNU/Linux". Or, as Arnt Gulbrandsen put it:

  Freedom includes the freedom to disagree with me and still use my software.