Suck/Inn FAQ

Suck is a utility which allows downloading of selected news groups to a local server via an NNRP feed; this is useful if your provider does not allow pull feeds from their NNTP server, or if you only have an NNRP feed.

You can get more information at the official suck site.

About This FAQ

Becuase I am not an expert, I have created a number of web pages for people to suggest FAQ entries. Please don't post questions! That's what the mailing list is for.

But, if you have solved a problem, not matter how small, and you feel it fits within the Suck/Inn FAQ, please Submit the problem and solution, and I'll look at adding it to the FAQ.

1. General

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1. No-one who knows anything about Suck/INN problems has submitted anything to these pages.

2. There are very few problems with using Suck with INN.

Take your pick.

Please, if you know of any issues and their solutions, submit them!

>news.myisp.com:*,!control,!junk,!local.*/!local::

Need to change this in:

news.myisp.com/ALIAS:*,!control,!junk,!local.*/!local::

Where ALIAS is that 'Path:' element I was talking about.

Setup INN and make sure you can post locally. Good.

Specifically, I'm using tradspool (storage.conf) but in theory this should work for other storage types as well, in particular cnfs.

The biggest thing to do is remove the ! from ME:!* and change remoteserver to Wf from Wnm.

newsfeeds file:

ME:*/!local,!control::

remoteserver:

:!local,!control/!local\
:Tf,Wf:

When you post to a non-local newsgroup the file path/outgoing/remoteserver should be populated with a string something like this:

@05010000000A000008C70000000000000000@

This string is also the third item in your history file.

Now the slightly trickier part.

From the suck/samples dir copy get.news.inn & put.news.sm into your inn/bin directory.

Edit get.news.inn with your variables. In theory this file should be re-written to use 'innconfval -s' but that's for somebody else to do.

FYI: you'll proably have to add -HF /path/to/history on the suck line

Change the main rpost line in get.news.inn to:

${RPOST} ${REMOTE_HOST} -d -b ${OUTGOINGNEW} -f ${SCRIPT} \$\$o=${OUTFILE} \$\$i ${OUTFILE}

Assuming I haven't forgotten anything you should now be sitting pretty and cross-posting your pr0n. ;)

http://homepages.ezysurf.co.nz/~pbs/pub/install_suck_wrappers/index.html

2. Errors from the News Server

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Pseudo code of get_message_index function:

for each GROUP {
	GROUP command
	XHDR msgid msgnr- 
}

pseudo code for get_messages function:

for each MSGID {
	article MSGID
}

telnet remote.server 119
mode reader (if you need the -M command) 
article  (include the <>s)
quit

For example, this might be written from inn when you have set up a newsfeed to your ISP. The articles already exist in /var/spool/news/... so there is no point in copying them, only pointing at them.

3. Privilege/Protection Problems

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localhost:

localhost:Read Post:::*

    localhost:Read Post:::*

Such a configuration can cause user authentication error when attempting to subscribe groups from the localhost server in Netscape.

This can be solved by adding an entry for the loopback address:

    127.0.0.1:Read Post:::*

4. Other Issues

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I use suck to download newsgroups then use rnews to pipe the articles to my local news server.

1. How do I stop INN sending the new articles back to my ISP?

2. How do I make sure that all *locally* posted articles *are* sent to my ISP?

From: "Michael J. Palmer" 

>My only problem is that when i want to send a newsarticle or reply to
>an article the file ~news/out.going/servername gets filled with a
>line pointing to that article.
So far so good, you have got your "newsfeeds" file working.

> How can i send that article to my newsserver ???

You use "rpost". The sequence is (roughly, I'm going from memory):

1) rename the file in out.going (e.g. to servername.old)
2) ctlinnd flush servername (causes innd to start writing a new file
   with the original name, giving you sole use of the file without
   inn changing it beneath you).
3) rpost ....
   (read the man page for rpost, can't remember the syntax)
4) rm servername.old

> And furthermore: when i recieve my new batch of articles, this
> ~news/out.going/servername gets filled with all lines pointing to
> all these new articles as if they are to be sent
> to my newsserver! So something is not configured right here.

A very common problem. When innd receives an article, it examines the
"Path:" line in the article, and sees whether it contains "servername"
(delimited by !). If it does, then that article is not put into the
out.going.  So you have to ensure that the "servername" you use in
your "newsfeeds" file agrees with what gets put into the Path: by
the newsserver that you are suck'ing from.
e.g. here at work I get articles containing:
  Path: hursley.ibm.com!newsfeed.de.ibm.net!ibm.net!......etc.....
so I'd typically call the newsfeed back out "hursley.ibm.com" and
only articles that didn't come in that way would be sent out.

If you suck from more than one newsserver, and you don't intend to
feed between them, then you must put _all_ the server names into the
line in your newsfeeds file (as alias's, see the man pages for inn)
so that none of them come out in the out.going file.

Hope this helps.
   Regards, Mike.

---------------------------------------------
From: rel@lipo.at0.net (Roland E. Lipovits)

In article <199904291326.WAA18763@dns1.3ware.co.jp>,
Michael J. Palmer  wrote:
>A very common problem. When innd receives an article, it examines the
>"Path:" line in the article, and sees whether it contains "servername"
>(delimited by !). If it does, then that article is not put into the
>out.going.  So you have to ensure that the "servername" you use in
>your "newsfeeds" file agrees with what gets put into the Path: by
>the newsserver that you are suck'ing from.
>e.g. here at work I get articles containing:
>  Path: hursley.ibm.com!newsfeed.de.ibm.net!ibm.net!......etc.....
>so I'd typically call the newsfeed back out "hursley.ibm.com" and
>only articles that didn't come in that way would be sent out.

If you are using INN (2.2, I guess >=2.0 should work) you can use
the O-Flag in newsfeeds so that only articles posted local are
spooled into outgoing.

Regards,
Lipo