nn Configuration
nn, written by Kim F. Storm, claims to be a newsreader whose ultimate goal is not to read news. Its name stands for “No News,” and its motto is “No news is good news. nn is better.”
To achieve this ambitious goal, nn comes with a large assortment of maintenance tools that not only allow thread generation, but also extensive database consistency checks, accounting, gathering of usage statistics, and access restrictions. There is also an administration program called nnadmin, which allows you to perform these tasks interactively. It is very intuitive, so we will not dwell on these aspects, but deal only with the generation of the index files.
The nn threads database manager is called
nnmaster. It is usually run as a daemon, started from an
rc
file at boot time. It is invoked as:
/usr/local/lib/nn/nnmaster -l -r -C
This enables threading for all newsgroups present in your
active
file.
Equivalently, you may invoke nnmaster periodically from
cron, giving it a list of groups to act upon. This list is
very similar to the subscription list in the sys
file,
except that it uses blanks instead of commas. Instead of the fake group name
all, an empty argument of ""
should be
used to denote all groups. A sample invocation looks like this:
# /usr/local/lib/nn/nnmaster !rec.games.go rec comp
Note that the order is significant. The leftmost group specification that
matches always wins. Thus, if we had put
!rec.games.go
after
rec
, all articles from this group would have been ...
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