Local news server mirroring some Usenet groups

[David Sargeant]

The news server that I run (news.hplx.net, using INN 2.3.0) has mostly
local groups on it, but there are a couple of Usenet groups that I want to
mirror so I can access them on my server.  With INN 2.2, I was doing this
(while actived and innd were running) by running tin -S to download unread
articles in those groups from my ISP's news server and store them in the
INN spool/articles directory, after which I would run ctlinnd renumber
<group> for each group.  This method worked quite well for INN 2.2, but
now, in INN 2.3, it doesn't work at all anymore.  I can get it to work
more or less by running makehistory -O instead of renumbering the group,
but that takes 15 minutes at a time on my machine even with the -x option.
Is there any way to do what I want to do WITHOUT using tin to download
articles -- to have INN directly download the articles, say, but without
paying for a news feed?  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks.