InterNetNews/inn 2.4.4

INN 2.4.4

on GitHub

2008-05-05
Full changes and diff from previous release

Highlight

• The sample control.ctl file has been extensively updated.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed incomplete checking of packet sizes in the ctlinnd interface in the no-Unix-domain-sockets case. This is a potential buffer overflow in dead code since basically all systems INN builds on support Unix domain sockets these days. Also track the buffer size more correctly in the client side of this interface for the Unix domain socket case.

• Group blocks in incoming.conf are now correctly parsed and no longer cause segfaults when loading this file.

• Fixed a problem with innfeed continuously segfaulting on amd64 hardware (and possibly on lots of 64-bit platforms). Many thanks to Ollivier Robert for his patch and also to Kai Gallasch for having reported the problem and provided the FreeBSD server to debug it.

• scanlogs now rotates innfeed's log file, which prevents innfeed from silently dying when its log file reaches 2 GB.

• Some news clients hang when posting an article through an SSL connection: it seems that nnrpd's SSL routines make it wrongly wait for data completion. In order to fix the problem, the select() wait is now just bypassed. However, the idle timer stat is currently not collected for such connections. Thanks to Kachun Lee for this workaround.

• Fixed a bug in the display of the used compressor (cunbatch was used if arguments were passed to gzip or bzip2).

• Fixed a bug in mailpost and pullnews which prevented useful error messages to be seen. Also add the -x flag to pullnews in order to insert Xref header fields in articles which lack one.

• ovdb_init now properly closes stdin/out/err when it becomes a daemon. The issue was reported by Viktor Pilpenok and fixed by Marco d'Itri.

• perl-nocem will now check for a timeout and re-open the socket if required. Additionally, perl-nocem will switch to cancel_ctlinnd in case cancel_nntp fails after sending the Message-ID. Thanks to Christoph Biedl for the patch. A more detailed documentation has also been written for perl-nocem(8).

• Checkgroups when there is nothing to change no longer result in sending a blank mail to administrators. Besides, no mail is sent by controlchan for the creation of a newsgroup when the action is no change.

• Checkgroups are now properly propagated even though the news server does not carry the groups they are posted to.

• Fixed empty LISTGROUP replies which were not terminated. Thanks to David Canzi for the patch.

• Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.

New Features

• Perl 5.10 support has been added to INN thanks to Jakub Bogusz.

• If compiling with Berkeley DB, use its ndbm compatibility layer for ckpasswd in preference to searching for a traditional dbm library. INN also supports Berkeley DB 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6 thanks to Marco d'Itri.

• Added support for Diablo quickhash and hashfeed algorithms. It allows distributing the messages among several peers (new Q flag for newsfeeds). Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this implementation in INN.

• innd now listens on separate sockets for IPv4 and IPv6 connections if the IPV6_V6ONLY socket option is available. There might also be operating systems that still have separate IPv4 and IPv6 TCP implementations, and advanced features like TCP SACK might not be available on v6 sockets. Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this patch.

• The two configuration options bindaddress and bindaddress6 can now be set on a per-peer basis for innfeed. Setting bindaddress6 to none tells innfeed to never attempt an IPv6 connection to that host. Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this patch.

• Added an nnrpdflags parameter to inn.conf (modelled on the concept of innflags) to permit passing of command line arguments to instances of nnrpd spawned from innd.

• A new inn.conf parameter called pathcluster has been added: it allows appending a common name to the Path header field body on all incoming articles. pathhost and pathalias (if set) are still appended to the path as usual, but pathcluster is always appended as the last element (e.g. on the leftmost side of the Path header field body). Thanks to Miquel van Smoorenburg for this feature.

• simpleftp has been rewritten to use Net::FTP. Indeed, ftp.pl is no longer shipped with Perl 5 and the script did not work.

• The RADIUS configuration is now wrapped in a server {} block in radius.conf.

• controlchan and docheckgroups now handle wire format messages so that articles from the spool can be directly fed to them.

• Newgroup control messages for existing groups now change their description. If a mail is sent to administrators, it reminds them to update their newsgroups file. It also warns when there are missing or obsolete descriptions. Furthermore, the newsgroups file is now written prettier (from one to three tabulations between the name of the group and its short description) and to.* groups cannot be created.

• In response to a LIST [file] command, if the file does not exist, we assume it is not maintained and return 503 instead of 215 and an empty file. Moreover, capability to LIST ACTIVE.TIMES for a wildmat pattern as its third argument has been added in order to select wanted newsgroups.

• inews now tries to authenticate if it does not receive a 200 return code after MODE READER. Indeed, it might be able to post even with a 201 return code and also with another codes like 440 or 480.

• If creating a new history file, set the ownership and mode appropriately. inncheck also expects fewer things to be private to the news user. Most of the configuration files will never contain private information like passwords.