Understanding News Transports

In Red Hat Linux, the innd and the nnrpd daemons handle news transports. The innd daemon handles the incoming news feeds. When users request newsgroup articles, the innd daemon starts a nnrpd process to handle the request.

The innd daemon is started from the innd run-level script. The innd daemon decides which incoming news articles to accept and which to reject, based on configuration information that is set up in a variety of configuration files. These include the active, newsfeeds, and incoming.conf files. (The INN configuration files for the INN news server are described later in this chapter.) The innd daemon also listens for user connections and manages the article spool directories.

After a user requests an article, innd starts a nnrpd daemon to handle the request. It does that by checking the active and history fields to get information about the article. It then gets the article (taking it from the local spool directory) and forwards it to the user.