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       net news updates
       September 17th, 2020
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       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