Notes for the Debian leafnode package:

Service startup
---------------

leafnode provides a socket-enabled systemd unit, but doesn't enable it
by default: There's no clear consensus in Debian whether socket-enabled
systemd generally phases out inetd invocation at this point and
non-systemd continues see (limited) support still.

For the vast majority of systemd systemd will be the preferred mode
of operation. For it you simply need to run

sudo systemctl enable --now leafnode.socket

If you prefer to use inetd (or if you don't use systemd, you can instead
use inetd. Debian's preferred configuration interface for inetd is
update-inetd (which is also a Suggest:ed package):

update-inetd --enable nntp --pattern tcp4


Configuring automatic fetches for news group updates
----------------------------------------------------

There's several methods to make leafnode fetch news group updates
from it's upstream NNTP server. For a single user setup with today's
network speeds you can just as well simply run 'sudo fetchnews' before
starting your newsreader, but in most cases you probably want to run
it in the backgroup in a given interval. The leafnode Debian package
ships a systemd timer which fetches hourly updates. It can be enabled
by running (and then adapted with "systemctl edit" if you want to
follow a different interval):

sudo systemctl enable --now leafnode-fetchnews.timer

Older package versions shipped a cron job to the same effect.

Similarly, a systemd timer is shipped which expires old news articles
from the spool. You can either run "sudo texpire" manually from time
to time, but if you want a systemd timer to deal with it automatically
simply enable the one shipped in the Debian package:

sudo systemctl enable --now leafnode-texpire.timer

Older package versions shipped a cron job similar to that.

Configuration
-------------

See the leafnode(8) manual page and the sample configuration file for
documentation of the configuration file /etc/news/leafnode/config.

If you place any login and password information required to access
servers in the config file be sure to check that the permissions on that
file do not allow people to see this information who shouldn't be able
to.

 -- Moritz Muehlenhoff <jmm@debian.org>, Sun,  2 Feb 2025 16:54:46 +0100
