Password This field (Web design service) is optional and is the
Password This field is optional and is the password accompanying the username field. Leaving this field blank means that no password is required to post articles. Newsgroups This field is a pattern specifying which newsgroups the client is allowed to access. The pattern follows the same rules as those used in the newsfeeds file. The default for this field is no newsgroups, so you would normally have a pattern configured here. In the virtual brewery example, we will allow any NNTP client in the Virtual Brewery domain to both read and post to all newsgroups. We will allow any NNTP client read-only access to all newsgroups except our private internal newsgroup. Our nnrp.access file will look like this: # Virtual Brewery -nnrp.access # We will allow public reading of all newsgroups except our private one. *:R:::*,!rec.crafts.brewing.private # Any host with the Virtual Brewery domain may Read and Post to all # newsgroups *.vbrew.com:RP::* Expiring News Articles When news articles are received by a news server, they are stored to disk. News articles need to be available to users for some period of time to be useful, so a large operating news server can consume lots of disk space. To ensure that the disk space is used effectively, you can opt to delete news articles automatically after a period of time. This is called article expiration. Naturally, INN provides a means of automatically expiring news articles. The expire.ctl file The INN server uses a program called expire to delete expired news articles. The expire program in turn uses a file called /etc/news/expire.ctl to configure the rules that govern article expiration. The syntax of /etc/news/expire.ctl is fairly simple. As with most configuration files, empty lines or lines beginning with the # character are ignored. The general idea is that you specify one rule per line. Each rule defines how article expiration will be performed on newsgroups matching a supplied pattern. The rule syntax looks like this: pattern:modflag:keep:default:purge The following list describes the fields: pattern This field is a comma-delimited list of patterns matching names of newsgroups. The wildmat(3) routine is used to match these patterns. The last rule matching a newsgroup name is the one that is applied, so if you want to specify wildcard (*) rules, they should be listed first in this file. modflag This flag describes how this rule applies to moderated newsgroups. It can be coded with an M to mean that this rule applies only to moderated newsgroups, a U to mean that this rule applies only to unmoderated newsgroups, or an A to mean that this rule ignores the moderated status and applies to all groups. keep This field allows you to specify the minimum time an article with an “Expires” header will be kept before it is expired. The units are days, and are a floating point, so you may specify values like 7.5 for seven-and-a-half days. You may also specify never if you wish articles to stay in a newsgroup forever. default This field is the most important. This field allows you to specify the time an article without an Expires header will be kept. Most articles won’t have an Expires header. This field is coded in the same way as the keep field, with never meaning that articles without Expires headers will never be expired.