INN
control-archive
Russ Allbery<br>> Software
News::Gateway >
INN
In the truest spirit of usenet I actually have zero idea what I'm<br>talking about and am making all this up, but it does seem reasonable<br>and has the added benefint [sic] of possibly even beng<br>[sic] true.
— Richard Sexton
Download
INN 2.7.4
tar.gz<br>(signature)
Released 2026-06-22
Debian packages
Archive
Development snapshots
Add-on software
Documentation
INN 2.8-to-be documentation
INN 2.7 documentation
INN 2.6 documentation
INN 2.5 documentation
INN 2.4 documentation
INN 2.x FAQ
Development
GitHub
Bug tracker
Open HUB code analysis
Debian package tracker
Description
INN (InterNetNews) is a full-featured and flexible news server package,<br>originally written by Rich Salz in 1991 as a higher performance<br>alternative to C News. It was then maintained for some time by Dave Barr,<br>then by James Brister, and then by Katsuhiro Kondou and I, and is<br>currently maintained by Julien ÉLIE and myself.
INN is an Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. project. They<br>graciously host the mailing lists and distribution site.
INN doesn't try to be the fastest possible news server, or the simplest,<br>and it's definitely not the easiest to configure. It does try to be one<br>of the most flexible, as well as acceptably fast for even large sites, and<br>over the years it's been used by many people as a platform for<br>experimentation with new news protocol ideas.
Requirements
INN is written in ANSI C, so it requires a C compiler and a modern<br>operating system that supports ANSI C. gcc will work fine. It also<br>requires Perl, at least version 5.8.0, since many supporting utilities and<br>parts of the build system are written in Perl. To build INN, you also<br>need a reasonably decent make program that supports include; GNU make will<br>do quite well.
For support for authenticated control messages, you need either PGP or<br>GnuPG, the latter being recommended. For embedded filtering and<br>authentication hook support, you need either Perl 5.8 or later, Python<br>2.3.0 or later, or Python 3.3.0 or later, depending on what language you<br>want to write your filters and authentication hooks in. For Cancel-Lock<br>support, you'll need libcanlock 3.3.0 or higher.
For the ovdb overview storage method, you'll need Berkeley DB 4.4 or later<br>(4.7 or later recommended). For the ovsqlite overview storage method,<br>you'll need SQLite 3.8.2 or later (3.20.0 or later recommended). If you<br>have zlib available, you can also compress overview before it's stored<br>into ovdb or ovsqlite, and enable the COMPRESS capability, a recent NNTP<br>extension.
For support for news reading over TLS, you'll need OpenSSL.
To support SASL authentication to nnrpd or to feed newsgroups to an IMAP<br>server with SASL authentication, you'll need the Cyrus SASL libraries.<br>INN can also check passwords against a Kerberos KDC; for this, you will<br>need Kerberos libraries.
On FreeBSD 11 or higher, INN supports blacklistd.
Download
The distribution:
INN 2.7.4<br>2026-06-22<br>tar.gz<br>(PGP signature)
You can also download from the official ISC site. An<br>archive of older releases is also available, as are<br>development snapshots. There are two sets of<br>snapshots: ones at the top level of the above link, which are updated only<br>when the code changes, and ones in the daily subdirectory,<br>which are generated every day (provided that the test suite passes).
INN is packaged in Debian as inn2, inn2-dev, and inn2-inews (which<br>contains only the inews client and is used for news clients that want to<br>use the INN inews to post news).
The inn package in<br>Debian is a packaging of INN 1.7, not of INN 2.x.
INN is maintained using the Git version control system. To check out the<br>current development tree, see<br>GitHub or clone:
https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn
Pull requests on GitHub are welcome.
Documentation
Where to start:
Installation checklist for INN 2.7
Full installation documentation for INN 2.7
User documentation:
INN 2.8-to-be documentation
INN 2.7 documentation
INN 2.6 documentation
INN 2.5 documentation
INN 2.4 documentation
INN 2.x FAQ
Support:
inn-workers mailing list
inn-workers mailing list archive
news.software.nntp newsgroup
Developer documentation:
GitHub
Bug tracker
Contributed documentation:
Video tutorial for adding a new peer
Installation et configuration d'INN (en français)
Der INN im Überblick (auf Deutsch)
Usenet RKT (Searchable Hypertext Usenet documentation)
Other links:
User-contributed add-on software
License
The majority of INN code and the package as a whole is distributed under<br>the following license:
Copyright 2004-2025 Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. ("ISC")
Copyright 1991, 1994-2003 The Internet Software Consortium and Rich Salz
This code is derived from software contributed to the Internet Software<br>Consortium by Rich Salz.
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any<br>purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above<br>copyright notice and this...