Newsfeed Peering with news.tamu.edu

Note for news.tamu.edu customers: This document contains vital configuration information, read the entire document.

If you have been authorized to receive a newsfeed directly from Texas A&M University (or more correctly, to peer with us), the incoming and outgoing host should both be set to:

news.tamu.edu

If your server becomes unreachable for over 168 hours, the feed will be terminated. For your feed to remain active, the news administration must have a valid email contact to the administrator of the machine to be fed.

The official contact information for the Texas A&M Usenet news server follows. We suggest you include this in your configuration file so that locating the information is easy when you need to contact us:

## Texas A&M University
## Computing & Information Services
## Systems Group / Unix
## (979) 845-4219 - ask for the Unix group
## news@tamu.edu

Do not request a news feed until after you have installed your news server, and have configured it to receive a standard IHAVE news feed from news.tamu.edu. Please see the sample hosts.nntp below.

After you have started your feed, outgoing news should be sent to news.tamu.edu as a standard IHAVE feed. Please see the sample newsfeeds and nntpsend.ctl below.

For initializing your active file, if we are your only feed and once you have properly configured your news server, you can download a sample active file from news.tamu.edu. Please see the "getting an active file" section below.

No news feeds will be set up for customers whose news servers are not registered in the Domain Name System (DNS). Requests whose host name do not resolve will not have their feed started.

If you are a Texas A&M System-related campus and your domain is currently authorized to have clients read news directly off news.tamu.edu, then activating a news server for your domain will mean that the client privileges will be revoked, as they should then be reading only from your server. It is your duty to inform potential users of the change. Feeds must be bi-directional, if you are only interested in reading, please just use news.tamu.edu as a server for your clients; do not request a feed.

Warning About Abuse

Due to the prevalent abuse and workload it causes us in handling complaints, we do not offer an Open NNTP Posting server. That means that we have limitations on NNRP access such that only hosts local to our organization are able to READ and POST articles to Usenet directly through news.tamu.edu.

Similarly, those sites that feed news.tamu.edu will generally hold the Administration of the news.tamu.edu responsible for those sites fed by us for abusive behavior initiated through their site if said site is unresponsive. Therefore, we highly suggest that the sites we feed also configure their news servers in a similar manner (via the nnrp.access file if using INN) to not allow their news server to be used as an Open NNTP Server. Please see the sample nnrp.access below for an example.

We hereby warn our feeds that abusive behavior from their site or direct feeds that causes technical or severe administrative problems at our site will cause them to be disconnected, if action is not taken to address the abusive behavior in a timely manner.

Be aware that the configuration of news software is complex and that we will only be able to help you troubleshoot your news feed. We will not be able to help debug your news software or hardware configuration.

If you are new to operating a news site and are planning on using INN, read the FAQ and Install. The latest FAQ is available at:

http://www.blank.org/innfaq/

Install is included with the INN distribution. INN may be obtained at:

http://www.isc.org/inn.html

Sample INN configuration files

Your hosts.nntp should include the following entry:

  news.tamu.edu:

Your newsfeeds file should include the following:

  news.tamu.edu:*:Tf,Wnm:

Your nntpsend.ctl file should include the following:

  news.tamu.edu:news.tamu.edu:

Your nnrp.access should be similar to the following:

  ## Default is no access, no way to authentication, and no groups.
  *:: -no- : -no- :!*
  ## Server Local Access
  stdin:Read Post:::*
  localhost:Read Post:::*
  127.0.0.1:Read Post:::*
  ## Site Local Access, use a *.domain.name rather than an
  ## IP block to require that hosts be resolvable via DNS.
  *.your.site:Read Post:::*

Your active file may already exist, or you can retrieve a sample from news.tamu.edu:

It is possible to initialize your active file relative to ours. Once you have configured everything mandatory for communication and have notified us to the fact, we will enable your host to connect. You can then pull down the output of the 'list active' command whichever way is easiest for you. Two possible methods are:

env NNTPSERVER=news.tamu.edu nntplist active > tamu.active
The nntplist command comes with trn, and provides an easy method of connecting to a news server and retrieving the possible datasets made available by the server via the NNTP LIST command.
Manually connect to the NNTP port and store the output of LIST active An example method on a unix box would be to do the following:
% script tamu.active
% telnet news.tamu.edu 119
LIST active
QUIT
% exit

You will then need to modify the transferred active file and use it according to the documentation provided with your news server.