Summary

Internet newsgroups provide a convenient way to discuss various topics and to share your knowledge with others. This chapter describes newsgroups and shows you how to set up a news server on your Red Hat Linux PC.

By reading this chapter, you learned the following:

Newsgroups originated in Usenet, which is a store-and-forward network. News items travel around the world from one system to another. Nowadays, news is transported over the Internet by means of the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP).
Because thousands of newsgroups exist, storing all the news articles takes a great deal of disk space. Moreover, the articles must be purged periodically; otherwise, the disk becomes filled. It's best to read news from a news server maintained by an Internet service provider (ISP).
This chapter shows you how to use Mozilla to read news from a designated news server.
Red Hat Linux comes with all the software and configuration files you need for the InterNetNews (INN) server. If you want to provide all Internet newsgroups, you have to find a site willing to provide you with a news feed. This chapter shows you how to set up the INN configuration files and start the innd server.
You can use local newsgroups to provide discussion forums to employees in your company. Once innd is running, it's simple to add local newsgroups. This chapter shows you how to add such local newsgroups.