From: morrison@isaac.ccs.carleton.ca (Greg Morrison)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Re: Help: Limiting News to a group
Date: 22 Jan 1993 12:46:42 -0500
Organization: Carleton University
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

In <1jf7t2INNcos@ftp.UU.NET> summers@redpine.cs.utah.edu (Jim Summers) writes:

>NOTE: I am not a newsadmin, I am asking for someone who is about to be
>put in this position and needs to implement the below.  Any
>suggestions would be very welcome.

>I have a group at a site that I am trying to limit to only certain
>readers at that site (e.g. a feed to a high school, but I only want
>instructors to be able to access the newsgroup).  Does anyone have any
>clever way to do this?  I was thinking about using groups to restrict
>access to a particular newsgroup, but am uncertain how to do this?

I asked a similar question in this group a few weeks ago.  Here is a
message I sent to my colleagues here summarizing the responses:

---------------------------

You may remember that at the first unix meeting the question came up
as to whether it was possible to set up a local (distribution only at
Carleton) newsgroup which would be 'private', in the sense that only a
specified list of users could read the newsgroup or post to it.

Subsequently, I posted a question about this to news.admin.technical.
I got a bunch of replies, many of which were along the lines of this
advice:  "Don't use NNTP for newsreading.  Use NFS or a local
filesystem, and set permissions on the spool directories as desired.
That should work."  Another person said, "Make the spool directory
uid=news, gid=group, mode=750.  Although that would allow anybody to
post into it, only people with gid=group could read it.  This will not
work if you are using NNTP."

Problem is, we are using NNTP, and presumably want to keep doing so,
especially to allow newsreading by PC and Mac newsreading programs.

One reply, though, said, "INN does allow per-user access."

So I hunted up some information about INN, which stands for
InterNetNews.  It seems to be an alternative to C-News for running
one's news-handling operation. Here's an extract which describes it,
from the posting "USENET Software: History and Sources" in the
news.anounce.newusers group.

> Another Usenet system, known as InterNetNews, or INN, was written by
> Rich Salz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net>.  INN is designed to run on Unix hosts
> that have a socket interface.  It is optimized for larger hosts where
> most traffic uses NNTP, but it does provide full UUCP support.  INN is
> very fast, and since it integrates NNTP many people find it easier to
> administer only one package.  The package was publicly released on
> August 20, 1992.  For more information, see the paper "InterNetNews:
> Usenet Transport for Internet Sites" published in the June 1992 Usenix
> Technical Conference Proceedings.  INN can be obtained from many
> places; its official archive site is ftp.uu.net in the directory
> networking/news/nntp/inn.

I have extracted from the INN distribution and printed a copy of the
Usenex article, and will bring it to the next meeting.

It seems to me that, whether or not INN will allow for private
newsgroups (this isn't clear from the article, at least not to me),
INN would be worth investigating, to see whether it would be desirable
to switch to it from our current news software.


---------------------------


Greg Morrison,                          |  morrison@ccs.carleton.ca
Computing and Communications Services,  |
Carleton University,                    |  phone: (613) 788-2600 ext. 2507  
1125 Colonel By Drive,                  |
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6         |  fax:   (613) 788-4448