Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

nn Configuration

nn, written by Kim F. Storm, claims to be a newsreader whose ultimate goal is not to read news. Its name stands for “No News,” and its motto is “No news is good news. nn is better.”

To achieve this ambitious goal, nn comes with a large assortment of maintenance tools that not only allow thread generation, but also extensive database consistency checks, accounting, gathering of usage statistics, and access restrictions. There is also an administration program called nnadmin, which allows you to perform these tasks interactively. It is very intuitive, so we will not dwell on these aspects, but deal only with the generation of the index files.

The nn threads database manager is called nnmaster. It is usually run as a daemon, started from an rc file at boot time. It is invoked as:

/usr/local/lib/nn/nnmaster -l -r -C

This enables threading for all newsgroups present in your active file.

Equivalently, you may invoke nnmaster periodically from cron, giving it a list of groups to act upon. This list is very similar to the subscription list in the sys file, except that it uses blanks instead of commas. Instead of the fake group name all, an empty argument of "" should be used to denote all groups. A sample invocation looks like this:

# /usr/local/lib/nn/nnmaster !rec.games.go rec comp

Note that the order is significant. The leftmost group specification that matches always wins. Thus, if we had put !rec.games.go after rec, all articles from this group would have been ...