Requesting changes in newsfeed from UUNET

This guide is for UUNET NNTP news customers. Included in it is UUNET-specific configuration information and instructions on how to request a newsfeed.

NEWS SOFTWARE
Our systems provide pushing and streaming feeds. When selecting your news server software, you will need to make sure that it can operate in this fashion. Due to the volume of news that flows through our systems, we strongly recommend that our customers accept streaming newsfeeds. We do not allow the use of pulling or sucking newsfeeds.

UUNET does not endorse or support any particular news software package. However, for your convenience, listed below are several popular news packages that are currently available.

For UNIX systems, popular packages include INN, which is freeware supported by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), and Typhoon, which is a commercial package written and supported by Highwind Software.

For Windows and Windows NT systems, popular packages include DNEWS, Microsoft Exchange, and Netscape Collabra. These are commercial packages and information about them is available from their respective vendors. Some of these packages do not implement streaming at all. Of those that do, some don't enable streaming by default, so care should be taken during system configuration to assure that streaming is enabled.

NEWS ACCESS
At UUNET, news is received via NNTP on the host custID.inbound.news.uu.net. This is the only system that will accept incoming NNTP traffic. Only UUNET customers with active newsfeeds may feed to this host. In order to send a feed to custID.inbound.news.uu.net, UUNET must have the fully qualified domain name of the host that will be feeding us. You may specify up to six (6) hosts. All servers feeding to custID.inbound.news.uu.net must be directly administered by the customer.

When sending news to custID.inbound.news.uu.net, please send only articles with less than 3 hops in the path, i.e. articles which have passed through a maximum of three news servers (excluding your own). This option should be configurable for the news software you are using. Please refer to your software documentation. For those using INN, specifying H3 in field 3 of the newsfeed entry in the newsfeeds file will do this. This is what it would look like:

If your newsfeeds entry for your feed to UUNET was:

uunet:*:Tf,Wmn:innfeed

To hop-limit the feed to a maximum of 3 hops, change the entry to:

uunet:*:Tf,Wmn,H3:innfeed

We have a number of systems providing NNTP feeds to customers. Your server(s)/firewall(s) must be configured to allow ICMP and NNTP access to port 119 on your server from all of our servers including: nntp-out1.uu.net thru nntp-out15.uu.net, each of which expands to approximately 17 servers.

Your server(s)/firewall(s) must also allow (and expect) periodic ICMP ping and traceroutes from UUNET on port 9. We actively monitor our connections to customers and, if we are unable to contact your server(s) by these means, your newsfeed may be discontinued. We also monitor connectivity to customer servers by opening an NNTP connection; your servers must expect this activity periodically.

Our news servers are known as "uunet" in path entries.

UUNET always feeds each customer with at least two separate newsfeeds, and on occasion, we may triple feed. This is done to improve the service quality. In this context, a 'newsfeed' is a single flow of news articles which may consist of one, two, or more separate TCP connections per newsfeed (typically a minimum of one and a maximum of five). Your server(s)/firewall(s) must allow for this. If you choose not to accept multiple newsfeeds, the quality of your service is likely to be degraded.

SETTING UP AND CHANGING A NEWSFEED
All requests for creation or modification of newsfeeds should be e-mailed to news-request@uu.net. Technical questions about your newsfeed should be sent to help@uu.net. Always include your UUNET account number/name in all correspondence.

When first requesting a newsfeed, send the request to news-request@uu.net with the subject "INITIATE NEWSFEED FOR 'sitename'", where 'sitename' is your UUNET account number/name.

To initiate the feed, we will need the following information:

1. Your UUNET sitename.
   
2. The fully qualified domain name to which we should make the NNTP connection. (IP addresses are not acceptable.)
   
3. The fully qualified domain name(s) of the server(s) that will feed news to custID.inbound.news.uu.net. You may have up to six (6) servers defined.
   
4. A concise listing of the hierarchies/groups that you want to receive, listed in the hierarchical format described below.
   

Requests are processed as they are received and can take up to one business day. You will receive email confirmation when the feed has been established.

To modify a newsfeed, we will need the following information:

1. Your UUNET sitename.
   
2. The additions and deletions you want made to the sys file, listed in the hierarchical format described below.
   

Requests are processed as they are received and can take up to one business day. You will receive email confirmation when the feed> has been modified.

All of the newsgroups that UUNET carries are listed in our active file. Descriptions for most of these newsgroups can be found in our newsgroups file. These files are in our archive as ftp.uu.net:/archive/networking/news/config/:

active.Z active.gz newsgroups.Z newsgroups.gz

These files are too large to be transmitted via e-mail so please do not request copies of these files via e-mail. The compression utility 'gzip' can be found for most platforms (including DOS/Windows/NT) in our archive at ftp.uu.net:pub/archiving/zip/'platform'. Also, some ftp clients will allow you to "get filename" without the '.Z' or '.gz', which will decompress the file for you as it is downloading.

The active and newsgroups files are updated in the archive several times per day. Copies of any of the above listed files that are more than a month old should not be used.

If you wish to receive a complete feed of all hierarchies available from UUNET, please take into consideration that a full UUNET feed can exceed 1,000,000 articles per day (including cross-posted articles) and regularly exceeds 75 gigabytes of traffic per day. Traffic volume can vary significantly and has been increasing over time.

If you do wish to receive such a feed, your news server will need to be reachable 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you intend to carry a complete UUNET feed, you should have a server that can accept a streaming feed. Non-streaming machines will have trouble maintaining a complete feed. Customers with non-dedicated lines (i.e. analog and ISDN connections) may not receive a newsfeed from UUNET.

Your newsfeed request must be submitted in all lowercase letters, in alphabetical order, with one entry per line. Do not use any commas or '.*'s after the group names. Remember that feeds are hierarchical: if you ask for 'comp', you will get everything in the comp hierarchy; similarly, asking for 'misc.jobs' would send all 'misc.jobs' groups. If you want a full newsfeed, ask for 'all'.

Do not itemize every single group you wish to receive, but send the shortest list possible with hierarchical feeding. If you want most of a hierarchy except for a few groups, you should request the entire hierarchy, then specify the groups you wish to exclude:

hierarchy.foo !hierarchy.foo.bar !hierarchy.foo.misc

Do not list out each of the subgroups you wish to receive.

If you already have a newsfeed and would like to change it, send us an alphabetized list of the groups/hierarchies you want deleted followed by an alphabetized list of the groups/hierarchies you want added. Do not resubmit your entire newsfeed request. An incorrectly submitted request will delay processing.

We will interpret the list of newsgroups that you send us exactly as it is submitted. In particular, this means that if you ask for a newsgroup that has subgroups (e.g.: comp.graphics), we will send all of the subgroups under it (e.g.: comp.graphics.explorer, comp.graphics.research, and so forth) unless you specifically request otherwise.

Additionally, we do not check for typos. If you ask for "rec.model.rc", we will add this group to your feed and you will not receive any news in this group because it is actually "rec.models.rc".

NEWSFEED CHANGE REQUEST EXAMPLES

1. You want to receive all the groups under misc.jobs. You should request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   ADD misc.jobs

   
   Do NOT request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   ADD misc.jobs.contract misc.jobs.misc misc.jobs.offered misc.jobs.offered.entry misc.jobs.wanted

   
   
   
2. You want to receive only the newsgroups comp.graphics and comp.graphics.avs, but you do not want any of the other subgroups under comp.graphics. You should request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   ADD comp.graphics !comp.graphics.all comp.graphics.avs

   
   Do NOT request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   ADD comp.graphics comp.graphics.avs

   
   This request would result in us sending you every subgroup under comp.graphics.
   
   
3. You want all of the groups in a particular category, such as every sci group. You should request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   ADD sci

   With this request, we will send you every group in the sci hierarchy. You should not list out every sci group.
   
   
4. You want to completely change your newsfeed to a new list of groups, or want to establish a new "base" feed and remove any patterns from your sys that you may have forgotten. Use NEW instead of attempting to DELETE all entries in your current feed then ADDing the new ones that you want. If you have a feed of alt, sci, and comp.binaries which you would like to change to 'all, !alt.binaries', you would send:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   NEW all !alt.binaries

   
   
   
5. You wish to receive a list of the entries your newsfeed is currently based on, send the following:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   SEND SYS

   
   Please format your newsfeed change requests as follows:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   DELETE alt.binaries rec.radio sci.med.nutrition ADD alt.fan !alt.fan.madonna news !news.groups sci.med.psychobiology

   
   Please do not indent the list or the headers, and do not attempt to mix 'ADD/DELETE' requests with 'NEW' requests. NEW requests will supersede any ADD/DELETE requests in the same mail. The order of the ADD and DELETE requests (when both used in one mail) is not relevant.
   
   Note that all requests are treated as entries, not as actual newsgroups. These entries are the patterns we match against each article's "Newsgroups:" header when sending you news. Therefore, if your newsfeed entries are "alt, !alt.frogs" and we receive an article with a newsgroups header containing "alt.frogs, alt.toads", you _will_ receive the article. While alt.frogs does not match "alt, !alt.frogs", alt.toads does. We send you the articles that do match; take this into consideration if you see articles that you think you should not be receiving: they may be cross-posted to a group you do receive.
   
   If your feed contains only 'alt' currently, and you wish to stop receiving 'alt.fan.madonna', you should request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   ADD !alt.fan.madonna

   
   You should NOT request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   DELETE alt.fan.madonna

   
   An 'ADD !group' request lets us know that you wish to "filter" a subhierarchy from a hierarchy you already receive. Delete requests are used to remove an entry from your sys file verbatim.
   
   Continuing the above example, if you later decide that you do wish to receive 'alt.fan.madonna' after sending in the 'ADD !alt.fan.madonna' request, you would request:
   
   For site 'your UUNET sitename' please:
   

   DELETE !alt.fan.madonna

   
   This will remove the entry '!alt.fan.madonna'. Asking that we 'ADD alt.fan.madonna' will not be handled correctly by the scripts that process these requests.
   
   Proper use of the above outlined format will allow for a more concise listing in your sys file. This will provide for more efficient processing of your newsfeed.
   
   When your newsfeed has been updated, UUNET will send you a copy of your revised sys file. This listing is sent so you can confirm the changes made. Please examine this sys file listing and let us know if there are any errors.
   
   Please use the "SEND SYS" command detailed above if you want to receive a copy of your current sys file entry.
   
   

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