Adding malta.* hierarchy to a news server (FAQ)
malta hierarchy
Archive-name: addingmaltahierarchy-faq
Posting-Frequency: monthly
Last-modified: December 17, 2000
Version: 2.0
Summary: This posting contains information for news administrators as well
as Maltese users, and those trying to get their system administrators to
get the malta.* newsgroups.
URL: http://www.malta.news-admin.org/
Adding malta.* hierarchy to a news server
This document explains the mechanism through which the malta.*
newsgroup hierarchy can be added to a news server, or how to configure
your server to carry it properly if the malta.* groups are already
present. It is intended for news administrators as well as Maltese
users in Malta, Maltese users abroad and foreign users interested in
aspects of Malta, trying to get their system administrators to get the
malta.* groups. It was inspired by the "How to add pl.* hierarchy"
document and other excellent FAQ's.
If you are a news user, please ask your news administrator whether
he/she could arrange receiving the malta.* newsgroups, and send him
this article or a pointer to the html version, at:
http://www.malta.news-admin.org (or at
http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/).
Please send any comments and/or updates to the author. News
administrators who decide to carry malta.* are kindly asked to contact
the author of this document, so a 'map' of malta.* can be drawn.
malta.* is the national hierarchy of Malta, currently under test. It
is intended to be a low-volume feed so it should not present a burden
on your news system.
The first newsgroup to be created was malta.test. For information
contact cm...@cis.um.edu.mt.
Policies will be created to avoid abusive messages, including
moderation or robomoderation of newsgroups. There are other venues
where this type of message is accepted and/or appreciated, however
they will not be allowed in this hierarchy, again since most of them
may be illegal under Maltese legislation.
Postings which fail to follow the guidelines may be cancelled by the
malta.* hierarchy maintainer.
The following types of articles will not be allowed on all malta.*
newsgroups:
Spam, Chain Letters, MLM's, Get Rich Schemes, Pyramid Schemes
Articles against the charter of a newsgroup
Personal attacks, name calling, indecency or defamation
Trolls - Messages which attact flames
Forgeries and Anonymous messages (except for nym type addresses, but
they should post on topic)
Binaries - It is better to put these on the WWW or ftp and post
pointers
_________________________________________________________________
Receiving the malta.* news hierarchy:
A) You must get the malta.* groups sent back to you
B) You must send the malta.* groups back (so users can POST)
C) Configure the hierarchy for the automatic creation of new groups
D) Appropriately handle posting to moderated groups
_________________________________________________________________
1. Receiving all the articles.
Contact the news administrator of a news server already carrying
malta.* newsgroups. Try to find the nearest one to your Internet
location. For this purpose the traceroute and ping -s commands can be
used. Obviously it is best if malta.* groups are carried together with
your normal or usual feed, but this may not be possible since the
malta.* hierarchy is quite young, being created in the last days of
August 1997. More and more servers are expected to be carrying the
hierarchy soon. Examples of sites offering web access are newsguy.com,
newsranger.com and Google (groups.google.com).
This is a list of servers carrying malta.*, that I am aware of. It
does not claim to be complete. There are much more.
Please note that these sites are not necessarily offering feeds to you.
MALTA nntp.cis.um.edu.mt
MALTA news.waldonet.net.mt
SWITZERLAND news-ge.switch.ch
USA news.newsguy.com
UK pubnews.netcom.net.uk/netcom.net.uk
UK news.demon.co.uk
BELGIUM newsfeed.online.be
BELGIUM newsfeed.belnet.be
Can any keyworld and satellite isp subscribers give any information
on whether the malta.* groups are carried by them? And whether
they are configured properly. This faq can help check their configuration.
First of all send email to your existing feed's news administrator to
see if he can feed you the malta.* hierarchy. If not you probably will
need to send email to one of the above news administrators. In this
email include your news server addresses:
- the internet address of your server
In reply you should receive the appropriate hostname/news name for the
host you will be receiving malta.* articles from. The first will be
different normally e.g. "news.mt". You should get the current list of
all malta.* groups that you ought to create manually. This list is
also posted regularly to malta.announce and malta.news.admin
newsgroups.
_________________________________________________________________
2. Sending news to malta.*
Unless you are receiving malta.* groups through your mainstream feed,
you will need to do some reconfiguring to send them back out. Then
even if you are getting them through your mainstream feed, you will
need to make sure that they are being included in the list of groups
sent back out.
When you ask for a malta.* newsfeed and you receive it, you also get
permission to send all malta.* groups back. In your 'newsfeeds' file
(in innd it is newsfeeds. in cnews it is called sys) add an
appropriate entry for sending malta.* groups back. Use the pathhost
name that you got to build the entry. In our previous example it was
news.mt. It might look like:
maltanews/news.mt\
:!*,malta.*\
:Tf,Wnm:
feeding site. You must also remember to tell your cronjob which sends
news to send them also to your feeding site e.g. feed.site.mt. If you
use nntpsend/innxmit add to your nntpsend.ctl file:
maltanews:feed.site.mt:::-T1720 -t300
^ ^ ^
| | + other parameters
| FQDN address of your feeding site/provider
+--Name used in newsfeeds file
That should be all. Post a test message to malta.test. At present I am
aware of the following autoresponder: nob...@crosslink.net (ignores
any article with "ignore" in the Subject line)
_________________________________________________________________
In your control.ctl file:
To get all the new malta.* groups created and removed automatically
when required, you are asked to add the following to the control.ctl
file:
newgroup:cm...@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:doit=newgroup
rmgroup:cm...@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:doit=rmgroup
The above is if you are not able to PGP check control messages. It is
recommended now however, that if possible you install and use
pgpverify (or the equivalent software for your system) to be able to
check control messages you receive for the malta.* hierarchy. INN
1.5.1 and later support PGP control messages by default. Once you
install pgpverify and you have obtained the PGP public key mentioned
below you will be able to change the above-mentioned two lines in
control.ctl to:
newgroup:cm...@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:verify-malta.config
rmgroup:cm...@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:verify-malta.config
New malta.* newsgroups will be created after discussion on
malta.config once general consensus is reached. No voting procedures
are in place at present - we will only require general consensus.
In special situations (current events) special newsgroups may be
created by the maintainer under malta.current-events.*
Such events may be world-wide.
Authorized newgroup, rmgroup, and checkgroups control messages will be
sent by the following Sender only:
Newgroup and rmgroup control messages for malta.* groups will be
PGP-signed using the PGP public key with user id "malta-config", which
may be obtained by sending e-mail to pgp-pub...@pgp.ai.mit.edu
with the subject "GET 0x5020AB79" and an empty body; alternatively it
may be obtained from the web at the following URL
http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/PGP.PUBLICKEY
The public key can also be found here:
Key user ID: 2048/5020AB79 2000/08/25 malta.config
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.6.2i
mQENAjmmghoAAAEIAL1I4uVHIlXVZ9f3iCZrQTKuYUfCJSRUwrzoQhfo5ZpEU6Ac
c/PuCD/L2akGoYhDky2dQqnmmV+dLyn7sxaznmEwHJrgQeeoIh4i/RizWNXJiB6P
GUvuUSQLQhJaQH3Lb/fSvUeLD6uZTSKE2qmOgwqgV4FS+tGeejLXd34ld6CsD9kP
GXzYtSYqwx9Z4xOqarvtviDr3a+vCc0Epj26IFXbfYD8ElSHVWrnbFVPMbJ71uKC
V8pkHz5acV3V6uw+FV7setgTj4vZcPrngjBXlAgxw1aJLWabXQqn8P9B8BoYVGV/
LQeCRKQtAsF8ZMlEXfsaDV1IwVTAegTENVAgq3kABRG0DG1hbHRhLmNvbmZpZ4kB
FQIFEDmmkmZ6BMQ1UCCreQEBjx0IAKJBa6j14XyNlPUwAsCYzzTEP1FztOTA1/0m
kPXheTcIieZpW82FWKkKik6AiNGjaK2LSMji+C5X4pBLEOiRLPkOJb3n5bHC9lDK
t4Iii6ZXxSadU/XnDg357208Y7z8CZixXeXNB+QbZu09bBm9kXiesppMJT1Ufx+U
LDGOJ8R8KQNxMraI/qb2qa1hmaLquCWFYBlb9QL/3LL3zh9yjWohUoYvvoQgbyWt
UEnGMEZmULQwSu0AU1HGdT/zmyWtPAozINMiTSb73bu/6mycXWHptiHgx2/XTTLL
FDjHRA4yVxN+xlU/GG+HeYf30B9qzgXjvnRLTUb9SjEn2+FFeHo=
=lVXx
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
_________________________________________________________________
Is there any 'checkgroups' message for malta.* groups?
Yes, there is. It gets posted automatically once every two months so
you should not see it very frequently. In addition you may get the
list of malta.* groups in the 'newsgroups' file format from the URL
http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/malta.newsgroups
and feed it to the 'docheckgroups' program.
The portion of the 'active' file containing just malta.* groups can be
retrieved from the URL
http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/malta.active
To keep in sync you can just download the malta.newsgroups file above
and feed it directly into the docheckgroups program. This should
produce a series of 'ctlinnd newgroup' lines which can be fed into the
shell for execution ( e.g. cat malta.newsgroups | docheckgroups | sh
).
_________________________________________________________________
Moderators file:
All posting to moderated groups under malta.* should be sent to
newsgro...@cis.um.edu.mt (with hyphens replacing dots in the
newsgroup name). So to your moderators file please add the following
somewhere before the default "*:%s...@uunet.uu.net":
malta.*:%s...@cis.um.edu.mt
Newest Newsgroup Status
The malta.news.admin newsgroup is obsolete and has been deleted. It
should be removed from every site carrying the malta.* groups.
malta.news.announce is the replacement for this newsgroup. The
following newsgroups have been recently created:
malta.comp Computing, Informatics, programming, IT in Malta
malta.media.radio Radio in Malta. Ir-Radju f'Malta
malta.media.tv TV in Malta. It-televizjoni f'Malta
malta.media.misc The Media in Malta
malta.news.announce For FAQ's,announcements,etc within the MALTA Hierarchy.
(Moderated)
It may take up to ten days for your news provider to carry the new
groups. If it still does not appear on the refreshed list, ask your
news provider to create the group manually.
Charters/FAQs of malta.* newsgroups
This new section replaces an earlier one which linked to Deja (now
http://groups.google.com). Google is still a misconfigured site which
does not carry all the newsgroups. They mark moderated groups as unmoderated.
Ask Google to fix their news-server.
Section under construction:
malta.config - Discussion of new newsgroups in malta.* (robomoderated)
malta.announce - Announcements concerning malta.*, Malta and the Maltese
malta.comp - Computing, Informatics, IT and Internet in Malta
malta.news.announce - For FAQ's,announcements, etc within the MALTA Hierarchy (moderated)
malta.fan.trekwho - Star Trek and Doctor Who (same as the TREKWHO-L mailing list - http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/staff/cmeli/lists/trekwho.html) (moderated)
malta.fan.x-files - The X-Files (robomoderated)
malta.test - Testing in the malta.* hierarchy
malta.media.radio - Radio in Malta. Ir-Radju f'Malta
malta.media.tv - TV in Malta. It-televizjoni f'Malta
malta.media.misc - The Media in Malta
Reading the malta.* groups through Newsguy.com
USENET Archive
A comprehensive USENET archive of malta.* postings is kept at
http://www.maltanetworkresources.com.
Thanks and Credits
Thanks goes to everyone who has contributed or indirectly helped this
project. Thanks goes to Nick Andrew and David Formosa for kindly
delegating and donating the use of malta.news-admin.org.