[ANNOUNCE] INN 2.5.0 available
Russ Allbery
rra at isc.org
Tue Jun 9 03:25:12 UTC 2009
Internet Systems Consortium is pleased to announce that a new major
release of INN is available at:
ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/inn-2.5.0.tar.gz
The MD5 checksum of this release is:
be60e463b2c21286eca45e994df307b2
A PGP signature is available in the same directory. Due to the extensive
changes between INN 2.4 and INN 2.5, no patch is available.
INN 2.5.0 is almost entirely compatible with INN 2.4, and most INN 2.4
users will be able to upgrade with a simple "make update". A few checks
explained in the upgrade changes below should also be made.
All of the applicable bug fixes from the INN 2.4 STABLE series are also
included in INN 2.5.
Further 2.5.x releases will be made for bug fixes. New features will go
into the 2.6.x series, which is already under development. Please note
that the STABLE development branch is now INN 2.5.x, and there will be no
further INN 2.4.x releases after INN 2.4.6.
Many thanks to Julien ÉLIE for preparing this release.
Upgrading from 2.4 to 2.5
The following changes require your full attention because a manual
intervention may be needed:
* In order to process control messages, controlchan now needs the
"MIME::Parser" module. Packages are available from most
distributions, or you can install the module directly from CPAN
("MIME-tools" in modules/by-module/MIME/, for instance on
ftp.perl.org).
Perl 5.8.0 or later is recommended for INN. If you are using an
earlier version, you will also need the "Encode" module for correct
processing of control messages. (It is included with Perl itself in
5.8.0 and later.)
* Checkgroups control messages are now differently handled by
controlchan: all matching lines in control.ctl will be used for a
given checkgroups and a doit action will really be executed (adding,
removing and changing the status of newsgroups). You should make
sure that your local configuration does not rely on the previous
behaviour of only mailing changes, without actually performing them.
* You should use the new control.ctl.local file shipped with INN in
*pathetc* and, at the same time, update your control.ctl and
*moderators files. Also make sure that your active.times,
*distrib.pats and newsgroups files are properly encoded in UTF-8, as
*it is strongly recommended by RFC 3977.
* The overview.fmt file is no longer used by INN. Two new parameters
have been added to inn.conf: *extraoverviewadvertised* and
*extraoverviewhidden*. Although innupgrade takes care of the change
during "make update", you should make sure that your overview
database is consistent with all the fields declared in overview.fmt
because they will all be advertised, and "Xref:full" forced as the
eighth overview field. See the inn.conf(5) man page for more
information about these parameters.
* The innreport configuration file has slightly changed. The new
innreport.conf file shipped with INN should be used and your possible
changes backported to this new version.
* The $SPOOLBASE variable has been renamed to $SPOOLDIR in innshellvars
in order to be more consistent. It impacts shell scripts only. If
you import innshellvars and use that variable in your scripts, you
will have to rename it.
* gpgverify is no longer included in INN, pgpverify now has better
support for GnuPG and should be used instead.
* The auth_smb authenticator program to check passwords with an SMB
authentication is no longer included in INN. It was a stripped-down
version of pam_smbpass, wasn't maintained, and likely had security
problems. To authenticate to an SMB server such as Samba, use PAM
and ckpasswd's PAM support instead.
The parameters used by nnrpd to provide TLS support are now
*tlscafile*, *tlscapath*, *tlscertfile* and *tlskeyfile* in inn.conf.
The sasl.conf file used for that in previous versions of INN is
obsolete. innupgrade takes care of the change during "make update".
The *nntpactsync* parameter has been renamed to *incominglogfrequency*
in inn.conf; innupgrade handles this renaming during the update.
In newsfeeds, innfeed should be run directly rather than through
startinnfeed. innupgrade will attempt to take care of this
modification during "make update".
When starting innd by hand, innd can just be run directly rather than
using inndstart. If you get error messages about resetting the file
descriptor limits, you may need to increase the file descriptor limits.
See the sample init script in contrib for an example of how to do this.
If you are upgrading from a version prior to INN 2.4, see also
"Upgrading from 2.3 to 2.4".
Major changes from 2.4 to 2.5
* Ken Murchison has contributed SASL authentication support for nnrpd,
implementing the AUTHINFO SASL section of RFC 4643. If the
--with-sasl option is given to "configure", nnrpd will be able to
authenticate clients via secure SASL mechanisms.
* Julien Elie has implemented in nnrpd the new version of the NNTP
protocol described in RFC 3977, RFC 4642 and RFC 4643. Consequently,
nnrpd now recognizes the CAPABILITIES command, the HDR and LIST
HEADERS commands, the second optional argument to specify a range of
articles to LISTGROUP, the OVER command, as well as the ":bytes" and
":lines" metadata items.
* Heath Kehoe has added the ability to compress overview data before it
is stored in ovdb. It significantly improves the performance of this
storage method and reduces the time spent by expireover. See the new
--with-zlib option to "configure" and the ovdb(5) man page.
* Alexander Bartolich has greatly improved innreport and especially its
XHTML output (a XSL transformation is also provided, if needed, in
innreport-filter.xslt, in the contrib directory).
* inndstart and startinnfeed are no longer part of INN and are no
longer used. Instead, a separate setuid root helper program written
by Russ Allbery is used to bind to the news ports (and does only
that), and is run by innd and nnrpd when necessary. This means that
INN may not be able to increase file descriptor limits for itself the
way that it could before. If you get error messages about resetting
the file descriptor limits, you may need to increase the file
descriptor limits as root before running rc.news as the news user.
See the sample init script in contrib for an example of how to do
this. More information on file descriptor limits can be found in
INSTALL.
* INN's IPv6 support was largely rewritten by Russ Allbery. IPv4 and
IPv6 are now handled through the same code wherever possible, the new
IPv6-aware APIs are used everywhere possible, and replacement
functions are provided for systems that don't have them yet. The
network code is now much more centralized, eliminating lots of
duplicate code and adding better IPv6 support to some utilities.
* INN now uses autoconf 2.61 or later for configuration. As a result,
some "configure" options have changed slightly and more of the
standard --*dir options should be supported in lieu of the old
INN-specific options. See "configure --help" for the available
options.
* Thanks to Kirill Berezin, the buffindexed overview method now
supports buffers larger than 2 GB. It is not necessary to compile
INN with large file support to use such large buffers with
buffindexed. Buffindexed is now also more robust with mmaped files
and uses more optimized data placement.
* tinyleaf, a miniature IHAVE-only leaf server written by Russ Allbery,
is now included. See the tinyleaf(8) man page for more information.
* controlchan recognizes the new application/news-groupinfo entity
described in USEPRO and can handle character set conversions of
newsgroup descriptions. The "MIME::Parser" and "Encode" modules are
used. Processing control messages has been greatly improved,
especially checkgroups: the active and newsgroups files are now
properly updated when they are processed, and all matching lines in
control.ctl for a given checkgroups are honoured (which for instance
allows to use both drop and doit actions for the same checkgroups
message).
A new control.ctl.local file has also been added in *pathetc*. Rules
set in that file override rules in control.ctl, allowing
administrators to specify local rules for some control messages
without modifying the control.ctl configuration file that comes with
INN. It also specifies encodings to use for the newsgroups file. By
default, UTF-8 will be used for newsgroup descriptions, as strongly
recommended by RFC 3977.
* The Perl and Python *filter_mode* hooks are now called when innd is
shutting down via either "ctlinnd shutdown" or "ctlinnd xexec" with a
new mode value of "shutdown". This will allow the Perl hooks to save
filter data across innd restarts without requiring that the news
administrator throttle the server first. (Python already had a
separate close hook that is also called.)
* The legacy innshellvars.pl script has been replaced with a real INN
Perl module "INN::Config" for Perl programs. The location of Perl
modules can be set with the --with-libperl-dir option to "configure".
All Perl scripts shipped with INN have been converted to use that
module. You may want to consider using "INN::Config" in your Perl
scripts, though innshellvars.pl is still provided with INN.
* Support for embedded Tcl filters in innd has been removed. It hasn't
worked for some time and causes innd crashes if compiled in (even if
not used). If someone wants to step forward and maintain it, we
recommend starting from scratch and emulating the Perl and Python
filters.
* If *strippath* is set in readers.conf, the whole user-supplied Path:
header will now be stripped. Previously, the final component of the
user-supplied Path: would still be retained.
* news2mail can now set the envelope-from address of the mails it
sends. A third optional part in news2mail.cf entries has been added
by D. Stussy to achieve that.
* The -g option to nnrpd is no longer supported. If you are verifying
passwords against the system password database, see the ckpasswd(8)
man page, and in particular the -s option. (A much better idea would
be to just use PAM, which ckpasswd supports.)
* Fixed a bug in "ctlinnd renumber" which was resetting the low and
high water marks of empty newsgroups in the active file. This
command now makes the low water mark one more than the real high
water mark. The answers to LIST ACTIVE, GROUP and LISTGROUP have
also been fixed to do that.
* Support for bzip2-compressed batches (with bunbatch) has been added.
* news.daily now processes innfeed dropped files during daily
maintainance, running procbatch.
* Support for *runasuser* and *runasgroup* parameters in inn.conf
allows to set the news user and the news group under which the news
server runs. Thanks to Ivan Shmakov for this feature.
New other options have been added to configuration files: *ignore*
in incoming.conf, *logstats*, *nnrpdflags* and *verifygroups* in
inn.conf, and *log-time-format* in innfeed.conf.
The --with-http-dir option has also been added to "configure" to set
*pathhttp* in inn.conf.
The *nntpactsync* parameter has been renamed to
*incominglogfrequency* in inn.conf.
* The sasl.conf file has been removed in favour of new parameters in
inn.conf to deal with TLS support: *tlscafile*, *tlscapath*,
*tlscertfile* and *tlskeyfile*.
* The overview.fmt file has been removed in favour of new parameters in
inn.conf to deal with transition periods to accommodate overview
reconfigurations. It is now possible to specify on the one hand the
fields that should be advertised by nnrpd in response to LIST
OVERVIEW.FMT and used for HDR, XHDR and XPAT requests (see the new
*extraoverviewadvertised* parameter) and on the other hand the
additional fields that should be silently generated (see the new
*extraoverviewhidden* parameter).
* Support for Berkeley DB versions prior to 4.3 has been dropped. You
will have to use at least Berkeley DB 4.4; the recommended version is
4.7.
* INN now builds entirely free of warnings from GCC with fairly
aggressive warning options enabled. This involved lots of cleanup of
const strings, signed versus unsigned type handling, correcting
printf formats, and other changes that fixed obscure bugs and made
INN's code more robust. Russ Allbery has also done considerable
cleanup work on some of INN's internals, simplifying, refactoring,
and removing duplicate code.
* INN's test suite is now much more comprehensive and tests some
high-level functions as well as more of the portability and utility
function layer.
* A lot of work has been done on documentation: improvements of
existing documents, new documentation, and proof-reading. Sample
configuration files are also more detailed.
INN is discussed on <inn-workers at lists.isc.org>. Please send any bug
reports or patches to that list.
Russ Allbery
rra at isc.org
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