SNNTPD(8)

NAME
snntpd, snntpdwrap - simple network news transfer protocol (NNTP) daemon

SYNOPSIS
snntpd [ -d ] [ -D debugfile ]
snntpdwrap

DESCRIPTION
Snntpd is a daemon to receive netnews by the Network News Transfer Protocol (RFC 977). It accepts a small subset of NNTP commands, and runs under inetd. Snntpdwrap is a wrapper shell script for older systems that have an /etc/servers file and cannot specify the uid of the daemon or options.

Snntpd spools received articles as batches in NEWSARTS/in.coming; the C News newsrun program should be run by cron to process those batches frequently. Snntpd reports its errors to NEWSCTL/snntpdlog, if it exists and is writable, else to stderr.

If NEWSCTL/nntp.allow exists, the name of the remote system is looked up in it. Host names must match exactly (modulo case distinctions) and domains are specified by prepending a single dot. If the name of the remote system is matched (or if there is no nntp.allow file), reception proceeds normally; otherwise, it is assumed that the remote system is attempting to read news via NNTP, has no access permission, or has committed some other error, so nntpd is execed to deal with the situation.

OPTIONS

-d  Enable debugging. Multiple options may be given, increasing the verbosity of the tracing.

-D file
    Directs debugging to file.

FILES
NEWSCTL/snntpdlog
    error reporting
NEWSCTL/LOCK.hostname
    lock to prevent multiple transfer connections from hostname
NEWSCTL/nntp.allow
    optional list of hosts and domains permitted to transfer netnews to us
NEWSCTL/history
    news history, to see if we already have an article
NEWSCTL/history.{pag,dir}
    news history indices
NEWSARTS/in.coming/nntp.XXXXXX
    accumulating batch file
NEWSARTS/in.coming/NNNNNNNNN.t
    completed batch file for newsrun

SEE ALSO
newsdb(5), cron(8), inetd(8), msgidd(8), newsaux(8), relaynews(8), rnews(8)
Internet RFC 977

HISTORY
Written at the University of Toronto by Mark Moraes.

BUGS
Doesn't support most of the NNTP protocol commands (in fact only implements a subset of the V1 protocol). This may be considered a feature.

Doesn't gratuitously whack off the high bit of each incoming byte. (This violates the NNTP spec.; how sad.) Bytes are 8 bits. Machines that keel over if the high bit is on should not run this code.

Doesn't limit the length of input lines. This violates the suggested limit of 512 bytes.