This software provides a comprehensive Usenet system.
Rich Salz originally wrote INN, and ISC took over development of INN in 1996 after Rich was unable to continue its support. However, several variants of the software were forming as the program became increasingly popular. If you want to receive notice of future releases of INN, simply send a subscribe message to [email protected] to get on the announcements mailing list. Note: ISC does not have the resources to offer support or training on the INN software, but they assured that they will post updated information on the partnerships in this area development on their site.
A news server performs three primary functions: it accepts articles from other servers and stores them on disk, sends articles it has received out to other servers, and offers stored news articles to readers on demand. INN supports accepting news articles via NNTP connections or UUCP feeds. Innd handles NNTP feeding connections directly while UUCP newsfeeds use rnews, which is included in INN, to hand articles off to innd.
Furthermore, INN handles feeding articles out to other news servers using innfeed, for real-time outgoing feeds, or nntpsend, and innxmit, used to send batches of news created by innd to a remote site via TCP/IP. INN can also handle outgoing UUCP feeds. The part of INN that handles connections from newsreaders is nnrpd.
INN comes with a wide variety of supporting programs to handle periodic maintenance and recovery from crashes, process special control messages, maintain the list of active newsgroups, and generate and record a staggering variety of statistics and summary information on the usage and performance of the server. Additionally, INN supports an extremely powerful filtering system that allows the server administrator to reject unwanted articles, such as spam and other Usenet abuses.
INN is free software that is supported by Internet Systems Consortium and volunteers worldwide. If you're interested in supporting the INN effort, additional information on donations, development, and requirements is available on their website.
Version 2.5.0: N/A