INN 2.5.3 release candidate

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi all,

A release candidate for INN 2.5.3 has just been made available
for download at Russ' web site:

    http://archives.eyrie.org/software/inn/testing/


Please report any issue you may encounter.  The final 2.5.3 release
is scheduled in October.

Suggestion for the announcement follows.




Changes in 2.5.3

    Please note that the HTML_STATUS compile-time option has been replaced
    with the *htmlstatus* parameter in inn.conf.  If you used HTML_STATUS,
    you should set *htmlstatus* accordingly.

    A confusion in the name of a key in innfeed.conf existed in the source
    code.  Make sure that the mispelled, undocumented *backlog-limit-high*
    key is *not* used in your innfeed.conf file; its real name is
    *backlog-limit-highwater*.  You should rename the key in case it is
    present in your configuration file.  Otherwise, it will not be taken
    into account.  You can run inncheck to verify that the syntax of this
    file is correct.

    It is generally recommended to run inncheck after any changes done to
    configuration files, especially with the new improved version of this
    script shipped with INN 2.5.3, thanks to the hard work of Florian
    Schlichting who added support for the syntax of incoming.conf,
    innfeed.conf, readers.conf and storage.conf.

    An up to date control.ctl file is provided with this release.  You
    should manually update your control.ctl file with the new information
    recorded about Usenet hierarchies.

    * When HDR/XHDR/XPAT was used on a new article coming into a newsgroup,
      requesting a header not present in the overview database, the first
      subsequent OVER/XOVER command did not show that article.  A remap of
      the overview data file was missing in nnrpd.  Thanks to Sam
      Varshavchik for the bug report.

    * When a header field appeared more than once in an article, it was
      missing from the overview data.  OVER/XOVER, as well as HDR/XHDR/XPAT
      using the overview, were therefore returning an empty field.  The
      content of the first occurrence is now returned, in accordance with
      RFC 3977.

      Perl and Python filters for innd now also properly initialize their
      headers variables with the first occurrence of header fields.  (It is
      still the last occurrence for the Perl filter for nnrpd.)

    * Fixed a possible plaintext command injection during the negotiation of
      a TLS layer.  The vulnerability detailed in CVE-2011-0411 affects the
      STARTTLS and AUTHINFO SASL commands.  nnrpd now resets its read buffer
      upon a successful negotiation of a TLS layer.  It prevents malicious
      commands, sent unencrypted, from being executed in the new encrypted
      state of the session.

    * Fixed a regression that occurred in INN 2.5.0 when leading whitespace
      have been made significant in header field bodies.  It could lead INN
      to drop articles and throttle itself when running as a slave because
      Xref: header fields generated by other news servers, or even
      INN 2.4.6, could contain (valid) leading whitespace.  Thanks to Matija
      Nalis for having caught this bug.

    * It is now possible to properly generate daily statistics with
      sendinpaths thanks to the new -k and -r flags that permit to control
      the interval of days for processing dump files.  The new -c flag
      permits to send a copy of the generated e-mail to the newsmaster.

      Also fixed an issue with statistics that could be missing or
      duplicated for a couple of days when monthly sent.

      The documentation has been updated and mentions a preferred daily run
      of sendinpaths.  This script is a complete rewrite in Perl, and is
      based on Mohan Kokal's initial work.

    * cnfsheadconf now properly recognizes continuation lines in
      cycbuff.conf, that is to say lines ending with a backslash ("\"). 
      Thanks to John F. Morse for the bug report.

    * The order of CNFS buffers in a metacycbuff is now properly read and
      written by cnfsheadconf.  There previoulsy was a confusion between
      hexadecimal and decimal values.  Thanks again to John F. Morse.

    * When the -l flag is given to cnfsstat, the cycbuff.conf and
      storage.conf files are now reloaded if they have been modified since
      the previous output of cnfsstat.

    * A single header field line is limited to 998 bytes, per RFC 5536. 
      innd was previously accepting, and also generating Xref: header field
      lines, up to 1022 bytes.  Now, nnrpd (acting as an injecting agent)
      rejects articles which contain header field lines whose length exceeds
      998 bytes.  And innd (acting as a relaying or serving agent) no longer
      checks that.

    * nnrpd advertises the COUNTS, DISTRIBUTIONS, MODERATORS, MOTD and
      SUBSCRIPTIONS variants of the LIST command in response to
      CAPABILITIES.  These commands already existed in nnrpd but RFC 6048
      had not yet been published.

    * Add support for LIST MOTD in innd.  Consequently, the motd.news
      configuration file which was previously used only by nnrpd is renamed
      to motd.nnrpd (innupgrade takes care of the rename).  innd uses the
      new motd.innd file in *pathetc* for its message of the day.

    * Fixed an issue at configure time that made INN wrongly assume that
      OpenBSD (4.6) didn't support Unix-domain sockets.  Thanks to Wim Lewis
      for the patch.

    * Fixed an issue on systems which do not have a working flock(2)
      function (Solaris, for instance).  mailpost and pullnews are reported
      not to be usable on such systems.  Many thanks to Dennis Davis for the
      bug report.

      A wrapper around shlock is now called in Perl scripts.  The
      INN::Utils::Shlock module has been added for that use.

    * Fixed an issue in the Python access hook for nnrpd:  it has not been
      working since Python 2.5 on 64-bit platforms, owing to a change to
      Python's C API, using a new Py_ssize_t type definition instead of int.
      Thanks to Raphael Barrois for the patch.

    * Improve the stability of the Perl filters for innd and nnrpd: properly
      save and restore the stack pointer when needed.

    * The Injection-Date: header, when present, is now used by innd and
      makehistory to determine the posting date of an article.  Otherwise,
      the Date: header is used.

    * controlchan now imposes a date cutoff on processing control articles. 
      The *artcutoff* parameter set in inn.conf is used.  Otherwise, without
      that cutoff, old control articles could be maliciously reinjected into
      Usenet, and replayed.  (An unsigned Injection-Date: header field could
      be added to an article that only had a Date: header field.)  A new -c
      flag has been added to controlchan to disable the cutoff check, if
      needed (usually when manually invoking the program).

    * nnrpd no longer adds or updates the Path: header field when an article
      is forwarded to a moderator.  It could otherwise lead to rejects at
      injection time when the article was approved by the moderator.

    * The X-Trace: header field was not properly generated when an article
      was locally posted.  The field mentioning the IP address was skipped,
      resulting in a wrong syntax for this header.  The local "127.0.0.1" IP
      address is now used.  Besides, "localhost" is now mentioned instead of
      an obscure "stdin" in injection header fields.

    * Fixed a bug in the frequency innfeed logs its status:  too many
      useless lines were written to news.notice.  Thanks to Florian
      Schlichting for the fix.

    * When unset in innfeed.conf, the *dynamic-method* parameter now
      properly defaults to 3 (instead of 0) and *use-mmap* to false (instead
      of true).  These two values were already the recommended ones in the
      documentation and the sample file.  Note that *use-mmap* is only used
      when innfeed is given file names to send instead of storage API
      tokens, which is a fairly rare use case.

    * innfeed no longer generates an error message (logged in news.err) when
      a parameter is not defined in innfeed.conf.  All the parameters have a
      default value, so there is no need to warn the user if they are not
      present in innfed.conf.  Thanks to Dieter Stussy for having reported
      this problem.

    * Implement an upper limit to the number of file descriptors innd can
      handle.  At most (FD_SETSIZE-1) file descriptors can be used.  This
      upper limit now overrides any superior number set with *rlimitnofile*
      in inn.conf.  Thanks to Steve Crook for the bug report.

    * A default timeout on outgoing sockets (using NNTPconnect) has been
      added by Florian Schlichting.  For a long time, there have been
      occasional problems with actsync (and probably other programs) that
      would hang until manually killed or restarted.

    * The flag -S has been added to innd by Florian Schlichting.  When used,
      innd reports the errors found in incoming.conf and exits.

    * pullnews no longer stops processing newsgroups when an error occur
      during its run (for instance when a newsgroup mentioned in the
      configuration file is removed from an upstream server).  Besides, it
      can now use authentication when posting to the downstream server.

      A few other minor bugs have been fixed as for the way pullnews counts
      the articles.

    * A new parameter has been added to inn.conf to determine whether the
      status file that innd can write out (depending on the value of the
      *status* parameter) is plain text or wrapped in HTML.  It previously
      only was a compile-time option, set to true by default.  Florian
      Schlichting added the *htmlstatus* parameter to provide a configurable
      behaviour.

    * It is now possible to run a script at the end of the execution of
      innshellvars scripts.  If a file named innshellvars.local,
      innshellvars.pl.local or innshellvars.tcl.local is present and
      executable in *pathetc*, then it will be executed by the corresponding
      innshellvars script (respectively shell, INN::Config Perl module, and
      Tcl).  A typical use is to add or override variables.

    * Add support for wire-formatted articles in scanspool.

    * A lot of work on cleaning old perl4-style code has been done by
      Florian Schlichting.

    * inncheck now generates a proper non-zero exit value when errors are
      found, and allows quiet mode with the -q flag.  Florian Schlichting
      has greatly improved this script in many regards, especially with a
      config-syntax parser for incoming.conf, innfeed.conf, readers.conf and
      storage.conf.

    * inncheck now properly finds the boundaries of substituted variables in
      newsfeeds thanks to Alexander Bartolich.

    * docheckgroups no longer uses awk.  On a few systems, the script was
      failing because of the presence of an old version of awk that has a
      limit in the size of the input it can handle.  Processing large
      newsgroups files was consequently impossible.  docheckgroups now uses
      Perl instead of awk, which solves the issue reported by John F. Morse.

    * Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.  In particular,
      the *debug-shrinking*, *fast-exit* and *initial-sleep* keys in
      innfeed.conf are now documented.  The function "filter_end()", called
      when Perl filtering is turned off, is also documented for the innd and
      nnrpd Perl filters.



-- 
Julien ÉLIE

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