Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: How do I set up a private usenet?
Message-ID: <1990Jun1.171206.5837@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <421@oha.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 90 17:12:06 GMT

In article <421@oha.UUCP> tony@oha.UUCP (Tony Olekshy) writes:
>I have B news running on my workstation.  I would like to set up a group
>of machines that forward a private usenet between them (say the oha.*
>hierarchy).  If someone is in the mood, I would appreciate an overview of
>how to do this.

It's no different from manually setting up new groups in the normal
hierarchies.  You create active-file entries for the groups and directories
for them ("addgroup" in C News, "inews -C" I think in B News), alter
your sys-file lines to send those groups to just the sites you want
to send them to, and alert those sites to do likewise.  That's it.

If you are seriously concerned about keeping that traffic really and truly
private, you should disable ihave/sendme on your site, as otherwise any of
your neighbors who can guess the message-IDs in the private groups (and
B News message-IDs are pretty easy to guess) can ask your machine for the
articles.

>Also, is there any advantage to switching to C news for such a private
>usenet, other than the normal things that C news does better?

You should obviously switch to C News anyway. :-)  However, I can't think
of any specific advantage in this context.
-- 
As a user I'll take speed over|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
features any day. -A.Tanenbaum| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu