---------------------------------------- net news updates September 17th, 2020 ---------------------------------------- Last year I wrote a guide on how I set up net news (USENET) on Cosmic Voyage [0]. It's designed not to peer with the big USENET, but rather with other tilde servers to make a micro net news network just for us. That post is still valid and if you run a tilde or pubnix and want to peer with cosmic, reach out and let me know. (DIR) [0] net news on cosmic voyage Since Tilde Club rejoined the fold and has become an active member of the tildeverse, deepend has been good enough to set up a net news node there as well. We ran into some challenges with the peering setup early on due to IPV6, but that's been solved. Now we're growing together and learning new tricks. Tilde Club opened up its access for using net news remotely, not just from the local system [1]. If you want to jump into the conversation now and aren't on Cosmic or Club, you can follow the instructions there to do so. (HTM) [1] usenet news via tilde.club User xwindows was chatting with me today about a mission to fix the few problems we have remaining on the network. Perhaps the most important is the expiration of old messages. As of this phlog Club is set to expire net news messages after only 15 days. Hopefully that will be rectified in the next few days, but also we're working on a way to suck in all the old posts off cosmic to refill the system. Cosmic's posts are set to expire after 1 year, so it has much more post data to share with the rest of the network. Today's immediate challenge was that cosmic didn't have a method to view that data from outside cosmic itself. Unlike Club I hadn't set up external access. With a bit of investigation and some trial & error that has been fixed. If you connect to cosmic.voyage from an external net news client you can get a read-only view of everything on the system. The only change required to make this happen was in 'readers.conf': # auth blocks match whichever group succeeds LAST # so having the local group below the wildcard # is important auth "default" { hosts: "*" default: "anonymous" } auth "localhost" { hosts: "localhost, 127.0.0.1, ::1, stdin" default: "<localhost>" } access regular { read: "*,!junk,!control,!control.*" } access full { users: "*,!anonymous" newsgroups: "*,!junk,!control,!control.*" } access "localhost" { users: "<localhost>" newsgroups: "*,!junk,!control,!control.*" access: RPA } The first two blocks handle local access which is basically saying if you're on cosmic you're good to go. Post away. Otherwise read. The three blocks following set up a two-case scenario for everyone else. If you connect and successfully auth your user will be set to whatever your username is. If not, you get the default name "anonymous". Then I have a blanket rule for everyone to be able to read everything, and finally a special rule for everyone not named anonymous allowing posting. So far testing seems to be working alright! Oh, and one last thing... If you want to make sure your expiration settings are nice and long (say... several years) then you only need to change a few config lines: # expire.ctl *:A:365:1095:never # innreport.conf cycle 365; # inn.conf artcutoff: 365