INN

In the truest spirit of usenet I actually have zero idea what I'm talking about and am making all this up, but it does seem reasonable and has the added benefint of possibly even beng true.

— Richard Sexton

Description

INN (InterNetNews) is a full-featured and flexible news server package, originally written by Rich Salz in 1991 as a higher performance alternative to C News. It was then maintained for some time by Dave Barr, then by James Brister, and then by Katsuhiro Kondou and I, and is currently maintained by Julien ÉLIE and myself.

INN is an Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. project. They graciously host the mailing lists and distribution site.

INN doesn't try to be the fastest possible news server, or the simplest, and it's definitely not the easiest to configure. It does try to be one of the most flexible, as well as acceptably fast for even large sites, and over the years it's been used by many people as a platform for experimentation with new news protocol ideas.

Requirements

INN is written in ANSI C, so it requires a C compiler and a modern operating system that supports ANSI C. gcc will work fine. It also requires Perl, at least version 5.8.0, since many supporting utilities and parts of the build system are written in Perl. To build INN, you also need a reasonably decent make program that supports include; GNU make will do quite well.

For support for authenticated control messages, you need either PGP or GnuPG, the latter being recommended. For embedded filtering and authentication hook support, you need either Perl 5.8 or later, Python 2.3.0 or later, or Python 3.3.0 or later, depending on what language you want to write your filters and authentication hooks in. For Cancel-Lock support, you'll need libcanlock 3.3.0 or higher.

For the ovdb overview storage method, you'll need Berkeley DB 4.4 or later (4.7 or later recommended). For the ovsqlite overview storage method, you'll need SQLite 3.8.2 or later (3.20.0 or later recommended). If you have zlib available, you can also compress overview before it's stored into ovdb or ovsqlite, and enable the COMPRESS capability, a recent NNTP extension.

For support for news reading over TLS, you'll need OpenSSL.

To support SASL authentication to nnrpd or to feed newsgroups to an IMAP server with SASL authentication, you'll need the Cyrus SASL libraries. INN can also check passwords against a Kerberos KDC; for this, you will need Kerberos libraries.

On FreeBSD 11 or higher, INN supports blacklistd.

Download

The distribution:

You can also download from the official ISC site. An archive of older releases is also available, as are development snapshots. There are two sets of snapshots: ones at the top level of the above link, which are updated only when the code changes, and ones in the daily subdirectory, which are generated every day (provided that the test suite passes).

INN is packaged in Debian as inn2, inn2-dev, and inn2-inews (which contains only the inews client and is used for news clients that want to use the INN inews to post news).

The inn package in Debian is a packaging of INN 1.7, not of INN 2.x.

INN is maintained using the Git version control system. To check out the current development tree, see GitHub or clone:

    https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn

Pull requests on GitHub are welcome.

Documentation

License

The majority of INN code and the package as a whole is distributed under the following license:

Copyright 2004-2023 Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. ("ISC")
Copyright 1991, 1994-2003 The Internet Software Consortium and Rich Salz

This code is derived from software contributed to the Internet Software Consortium by Rich Salz.

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND ISC DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL ISC BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

Some portions of INN are distributed under other licenses. See the file LICENSE in the distribution for all of the details.