InterNetNews/inn 2.6.0

INN 2.6.0

on GitHub

2015-09-12
Full changes and diff from previous release

Upgrading from 2.5 to 2.6

The following changes require your full attention because a manual intervention may be needed:

• The name and location of the pullnews configuration file have changed. It is now pullnews.marks, located in pathdb when pullnews is run as the news user, or otherwise in the running user's home directory. This file was previously stored in .pullnews in the running user's home directory (even for the news user). If you use pullnews, you need to manually move and rename the configuration file; otherwise, it will no longer work. Note that the -c flag passed to pullnews allows specifying another configuration file, if need be.

• The default location of the mailpost database directory has changed from pathtmp to pathdb. If you use mailpost without an explicitly specified database directory (using the -b flag), then you should manually move your current database files mailpost-msgid.dir and mailpost-msgid.pag from pathtmp to pathdb.

• If you have been using TLS/SSL with nnrpd before, be aware that the default value of a few inn.conf parameters have changed: the server now decides the preferred cipher (instead of the client), and only TLS protocols are allowed (using the flawed SSLv2 and SSLv3 protocols is now disabled). If you want to change these settings, the respective tlspreferserverciphers and tlsprotocols parameters can be tuned to your needs.

• The --with-kerberos configure flag used to add Kerberos v5 support has been renamed to --with-krb5.

• The --with-berkeleydb configure flag used to add Berkeley DB support has been renamed to --with-bdb.

• The --enable-ipv6 configure flag no longer exists. IPv6 is now unconditionally enabled, if available.

• $HOME is no longer exported as an environment variable by innshellvars, innshellvars.tcl and the Perl module INN::Config. It was previously overriding the default user home directory with pathnews. If you use these scripts in your own scripts, you will have to take care of that change.

• Owing to the implementation of RFC 4643 (AUTHINFO USER/PASS) in innd, if remote peers have to authenticate in order to feed articles, they now have to send a username (which was previously wrongly optional), before sending their password. The mandatory username, though currently unused by innd, can be whatever the remote peer wishes. In previous versions of INN, inncheck was already complaining when passwd.nntp contained an empty username associated with a password. A manual review of authenticated feeds should then be done so as to ensure that they are properly working.

• The Injection-Date and Injection-Info header fields are now generated by nnrpd at injection time instead of the NNTP-Posting-Date, NNTP-Posting-Host, X-Complaints-To and X-Trace header fields. Local scripts that were using (for authentication, privacy, etc.) these now deprecated header fields should be updated. Also note that the Path header field of locally posted articles can also contain the contents of the deprecated NNTP-Posting-Host header field.

• The two addnntppostingdate and addnntppostinghost parameters in inn.conf have been respectively renamed to addinjectiondate and addinjectionpostinghost. innupgrade takes care of the modification only for inn.conf; a manual change will therefore be needed for readers.conf, if these parameters are overridden in this file.

• The default values of a few inn.conf parameters have changed to make use of the vastly expanded storage and RAM commonly available today: datamovethreshold (from 8192 to 16384), msgidcachesize (from 16000 to 64000), overcachesize (from 64 to 128), and wireformat (now enabled by default). The generation of status reports and performance timings are now also enabled by default: logstatus and nnrpdoverstats parameters, with a frequency of 10 minutes (status and timer parameters).

• The default value of max-queue-size has changed from 5 to 20, and use-mmap now defaults to true for innfeed.conf.

If you are upgrading from a version prior to INN 2.5, see also upgrades instructions from 2.4 to 2.5.

Bug Fixes

• The NNTP protocol requires a username to be sent before a password when authentication is used. innd was wrongly allowing only a password to be sent by authenticated peers. See the note above for more details.

• The Lines header field is no longer generated by nnrpd at injection time.

• The presence of a Subject header field beginning with cmsg no longer causes an article to be interpreted as a control message by nnrpd at injection time.

• Fixed a leak of semaphores when using buffindexed. Thanks to Richard Kettlewell for having fixed the issue.

• Other minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.

• All of the applicable bug fixes from the INN 2.5 STABLE series are also included in INN 2.6.

New Features

• The Injection-Date header field is now generated by nnrpd at injection time instead of the deprecated NNTP-Posting-Date header field, when addinjectiondate is set to true. Note that addnntppostingdate has been renamed to addinjectiondate in inn.conf.

• The Injection-Info header field is now generated by nnrpd at injection time instead of the deprecated NNTP-Posting-Host (when addinjectionpostinghost is set to true), X-Complaints-To and X-Trace header fields. Note that addnntppostinghost has been renamed to addinjectionpostinghost in inn.conf. The Path header field of locally posted articles now also contains the contents of the NNTP-Posting-Host header field.

• A new addinjectionpostingaccount parameter has been added in inn.conf. When set to true, the Injection-Info header field contains an additional posting-account attribute that mentions the username assigned to the user at connection time or after authentication. The default value for this parameter is false.

• A few header fields are now considered as obsolete by nnrpd at injection time: NNTP-Posting-Date, NNTP-Posting-Host, X-Complaints-To, X-Trace, Also-Control, Article-Names, Article-Updates, and See-Also header fields.
  Besides, nnrpd will similarly reject obsolete sendsys, senduuname and version control messages.

• nnrpd no longer differentiates IHAVE from POST. Articles injected with IHAVE are now treated as though they were injected with POST. It means that if the previous behaviour of IHAVE was expected, innd should handle itself the connection instead of nnrpd.

• The name of the pullnews configuration file is now pullnews.marks located in pathdb when pullnews is run as the news user, or otherwise in the running user's home directory. It was previously stored in .pullnews in the running user's home directory (even for the news user).

• Building with Libtool is no longer optional. The --enable-libtool option to configure has been removed.

• DESTDIR and non-root installs are now properly supported and documented in INSTALL. The make install, make update and make cert steps properly obey DESTDIR. Besides, it is no longer a requirement that the installation step be done by the superuser, as long as the user executing the install has supplied a DESTDIR value that points to a writable directory, and the person or process performing the install corrects the file ownerships when INN is installed on the system on which it's going to run. Thanks to James Ralston for this support.

• When building INN with Berkeley DB, Cyrus SASL, Kerberos v5, OpenSSL, or zlib support, no longer add standard locations to compiler and linker include flags. Such default paths are now added only if explicitly given to one or more of the --with-bdb, --with-bdb-include, --with-bdb-lib, --with-sasl, --with-sasl-include, --with-sasl-lib, --with-krb5, --with-krb5-include, --with-krb5-lib, --with-openssl, --with-openssl-include, --with-openssl-lib, --with-zlib, --with-zlib-include, or --with-zlib-lib configure flags (the flags ending with -include and -lib are new in INN 2.6.0).

• If the Berkeley DB, Cyrus SASL, Kerberos v5, or OpenSSL SSL and crypto libraries are found at configure time, INN will now be built with support for them unless respectively the --without-bdb, --without-sasl, --without-krb5, or --without-openssl flags are explicitly passed to configure. Note that it was already the default behaviour for zlib support when Berkeley DB support was also enabled.

• The configure flag --enable-reduced-depends has been added to request that library probes assume shared libraries are in use and dependencies of libraries should not be probed. It therefore tries to minimize the shared library dependencies of the resulting binaries on platforms with proper shared library dependencies. This is not enabled by default, and is of interest primarily to people building packages for distributions.

• Building INN with Python support now requires the use of Python 2.2.0 or later as the distutils.sysconfig module used was introduced with Python 2.2.0.

• The INN test suite driver is now fully synchronized with the upstream version of the C TAP Harness package maintained by Russ Allbery. Keeping the INN test suite driver up-to-date will be possible thanks to a new getc-tap-harness script in the support directory that automatically fetches the latest upstream changes.
  Similarly, the new getrra-c-util script permits keeping most of the utility and portability functions synchronized with the upstream version of the rra-c-util package maintained by Russ Allbery.