Creating the Article Spool (CNFS only)

If you are using actual files as your CNFS buffers, you will need to pre-create those files, ensuring they're the right size. The easiest way to do this is with dd. For each cycbuff in cycbuff.conf, create the buffer with the following commands as the news user:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/buffer bs=1k count=BUFFERSIZE
    chmod 664 /path/to/buffer

Substitute the correct path to the buffer and the size of the buffer as specified in cycbuff.conf. This will create a zero-filled file of the correct size; it may take a while, so be prepared to wait.

If you are using raw devices, you don't technically have to do anything at all (since INN is capable of using the devices in /dev), but you probably want to create special device files for those devices somewhere for INN's private use. Not only is it more convenient to keep all of INN's stuff together, the device files used by INN really should be owned by the news user and group and you may not want to do that with the files in /dev.

To create the device files for INN, use mknod with a type of b, getting the major and minor device numbers from the existing devices in /dev. There's a small shell script in cycbuff.conf(5) that may help with this. Make sure to create the device files in the location INN expects them (specified in cycbuff.conf).