view INSTALL.html @ 0:04124a4423d4 noffle

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author enz
date Tue, 04 Jan 2000 11:35:42 +0000
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<title>NOFFLE Installation</title>
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<h1>NOFFLE Installation</h1>
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<p>
<hr>
<p>

For compiling NOFFLE there are the following requirements:
<p>

<ul>

<li>
The gdbm library must be installed on your system (standard with
most distributions).
<p>
Please use the same compiler for compiling NOFFLE that was
used for compiling the gdbm library!
<p>
The reason for this warning is that there is an incompatibility between
egcs and gcc that causes programs to crash on some distributions,
depending on the optimisation level.
<p>

<li>
The program "mail" must be available, because failed postings are
returned to the sender by calling it (with option -s and by piping
message text into it).
<p>

<li>
The program "sort" must be available (standard with most distributions).
<p>

</ul>

<p>
For installing NOFFLE on your system, the following steps are necessary:
<p>

<ul>

<li>
Edit the Makefile. Change SPOOLDIR and PREFIX, if you do not
like the defaults.
<p>

<li>
Type 'make'.
<p>

<li>
Log in as root and type 'make install'.
<p>

<li>
Copy '&lt;PREFIX&gt;/doc/noffle/noffle.conf.example' to '/etc/noffle.conf' and
edit it. Write in the name of the remote news server.
<br>
Change the owner to 'news':
<pre>
         chown news.news /etc/noffle.conf
</pre>
Make it unreadable by others, if it contains a username and a password:
<pre>
         chmod o-r /etc/noffle.conf
</pre>
Now you can leave the root account.
<p>

<li>
Go online and run
<pre>
         noffle --query groups # required
         noffle --query desc   # optional group descriptions
</pre>
<p>
to retrieve newsgroup information.
<br>
This may take a while depending on the number of active newsgroups
at the remote news server.
<p>   
Subscribe to some groups by running
<pre>
         noffle --subscribe-over <groupname>
</pre>
or
<pre>
         noffle --subscribe-thread <groupname>
</pre>
or
<pre>
         noffle --subscribe-full <groupname>
</pre>
Then run
<pre>
         noffle --fetch
</pre>
for testing the retrieving of overviews/articles of the groups subscribed.
<p>

<li>
Add a line for 'noffle' to '/etc/inetd.conf':
<pre>
         nntp stream tcp nowait news /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/bin/noffle -r
</pre>
(Change the path of noffle if necessary)
<p>

<li>
Add the following lines to your 'ip-up' script:
<pre>
         /usr/local/bin/noffle --fetch
         /usr/local/bin/noffle --online
</pre>
<p>
Add the following line to your 'ip-down' script:
<pre>
         /usr/local/bin/noffle --offline
</pre>
Add a line for running noffle to the crontab of news (by running
'crontab -u news -e' as root):
<pre>
         0 19 * * 1 /usr/local/bin/noffle --expire 14
</pre>
(if you want to run 'noffle' on Monday (1st day of week) at
19.00 and delete all articles not accessed within the last 14 days).
<p>

</ul>

Now you are ready, configure the client readers to use "localhost" port 119
as news server and/or set the environment variable NNTPSERVER to
"localhost" and/or create the file /etc/nntpserver containing "localhost".
<p>
If something goes wrong, have a look at '/var/log/news' for error and
logging messages.
<p>
It can be helpful to recompile NOFFLE with the
-DDEBUG option to increase the level of logged details. Additionally,
the -DDEBUG option will create a core file in the spool directory if NOFFLE
should crash. This will allow those of you familiar with a debugger to send
me a detailed bug report :-)

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