From: davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: how can I have private newsgroups?
Keywords: news private newsgroups
Date: 11 Jan 93 08:18:50 GMT

andrew@calvin.dgbt.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick) writes:

>A while ago I wrote:

>> Is there a way for me to have private local newsgroups?
>> 
>> That is, I have a list of users and they should be the only ones who
>> can read and post to this newsgroup.  Better yet, no one else should
>> even know about this newsgroup.
>> 
>> I am using C-News and various news readers.

Sounds like we want the same thing. I just posted a query about the same
thing.

>I received 10 replies from various people, but still do not have a good
>answer to my question.

Me either...

>A number of people suggested I use a mailing list.  I already have one
>of these, and I still want a private newsgroup.  Newsgroups are much
>better for following threads, archiving discussions, etc.

And if people are dialing-in over expensive links (all calls cost in
Japan), perhaps the most important feature of news is you can select
articles by subject or by preview. You don't have to take it all! 

>Some other people talked about modifying sys files to make sure the
>newsgroups are not distributed to other systems.  This is not the
>problem.  I want to restrict these groups to only a certain list of
>users on the local machine.

Right. I have a bunch of local newsgroups (they only stay on
my machine) but they aren't private (anybody with an account on
my machine can access them).

>One person suggested that the Waffle BBS software could do the job.  I
>am hesistant to try this since Waffle costs money (this is for a
>FreeNet with little or no budget) and will probably require building a
>whole news system for one or two private groups.

I have Waffle running and it's not all that expensive ($130). It does
indeed allow you to assign newsgroups and people to groups and control
the access. But the Waffle newsreader is rudimentary compared to rn/nn....

>Another person suggested that group permission in the news/spool
>directory might work, and I have not tried this yet.

Assuming the people on your system don't have any other use for
groups I think this would work. But you could only control one group
without asking people to exit the newsreader and change to another.
Not convenient! 

>So, if anyone has any further ideas, I still want to hear about them.
>Here is a partial digest of the replies I received:

[* omitted as nothing new *]

The best suggestion so far has been to implement the check in the
nntp server which would thus apply to all newsreaders (if you aren't
using nntp this could be an expense but I have it running already). 

I had a look at the code for the server and there is already a
function which checks userid and password in auth.c and a function
which changes to a new newsgroup in group.c. Given some time and
energy I would think one could lash them together so the calling
newsreader would send the userid+password+group to change groups and
the server could check this combination out against some list
/etc/group.nntp. 

But I was hoping that somebody had already done this.....

Dave

--
Dave McLane 
JUNET: davidg@aegis.or.jp (ONLY within Japan: post otherwise)
Nagaokakyoshi, Kyoto Japan Tel: +81-75-951-1168 Fax: +81-75-957-1087
Newsgroups: news.software.b