Red Hat 7.1 & inn-2.3.1-2

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Tue, 22 May 2001, David Hansen Jr. wrote:

> "Please run makehistory and/or makedbz before starting innd."

If you'd installed INN from source, I would tell you to follow the
directions in the INSTALL file.  I don't know if that exists in the Redhat
package, though.  If not, here's the relevant section:

Creating the Database Files

    At this point, you need to set up the news database directory
    (~news/db).  This directory will hold the active file (the list of
    newsgroups you carry), the active.times file (the creator and creation
    time of newsgroups created since the server was initialized), the
    newsgroups file (descriptions for all the newsgroups you carry), and the
    history file (a record of every article the server currently has or has
    seen in the past few days, used to decide whether to accept or refuse
    new incoming messages).

    Before starting to work on this, make sure you're logged on as the news
    user, since all of these files need to be owned by that user.  This is a
    good policy to always follow; if you are doing any maintenance work on
    your news server, log on as the news user.  Don't do maintenance work as
    root.  Also make sure that ~news/bin is in the default path of the news
    user (and while you're at it, make sure ~news/man is in the default
    MANPATH) so that you can run INN maintenance commands without having to
    type the full path.

    If you already have a server set up (if you're upgrading, or setting up
    a new server based on an existing server), copy active and newsgroups
    from that server into ~news/db.  Otherwise, you'll need to figure out
    what newsgroups you want to carry and create new active and newsgroups
    files for them.  If you plan to carry a full feed, or something close to
    that, go to <ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/> and download active
    and newsgroups from there; that will start you off with reasonably
    complete files.  If you plan to only carry a small set of groups, the
    default minimal active file installed by INN is a good place to start
    and you can create additional groups after the server is running by
    using "ctlinnd newgroup".

    "control" and "junk" must exist as newsgroups in your active file for
    INN to start, and creating pseudogroups for the major types of control
    messages is strongly encouraged for all servers that aren't standalone.
    "to" must also exist as a newsgroup if you have mergetogroups set in
    inn.conf.

    Next, you need to create an empty history database.  To do this, type:

        cd ~news/db
        touch history
        makedbz -i

    When it finishes, rename the files it created to remove the ".n" in the
    file names and then make sure the file permissions are correct on all
    the files you've just created:

        chmod 644 *

    Your news database files are now ready to go.


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org