HyperNews Source

Now available is hypernews1.9.3.tar.gz. You can also get it via ftp: ftp://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/pub/hypernews1.9.3.tar.gz. The distribution includes the installation and user instruction documents that correspond to that version. Let us know about problems with this release.

After downloading the source, you need to install it.

Please subscribe to the history page so you will be notified when new releases occur. (Please do this especially if you install a beta version.)

If you find any bugs, please report them to an appropriate page, based on what feature has the bug. For example, if bugs occur during installation, add to the installation page. Use the bugs page if nothing else fits. There is a HyperNews Test page to which you may add miscellaneous tests.

If you improve the HyperNews code, by all means let us know so we can pass your changes on to others.

If any of your HyperNews pages will be readable by the public, We'd like to include a reference to them from the HyperNews Home Page.

Related Documentation and Forums

• Installation Instructions
  • Creating Base Articles, also called Forums.
  • Security Issues regarding HyperNews
  • Bidirectional E-mail Gateway
• Members - how to become one, and what it means
• History of HyperNews' Versions
• Bugs - past and present

Licensing

• Free or non-free redistribution of unmodified HyperNews - you would simply be providing a replica of our free distribution.
• Free distribution of your modified version of HyperNews.
• Non-free distribution of your modified version of HyperNews as long as you have made your modifications available to us to include in our free distribution if we choose to.

If you are interested in selling your version of HyperNews with proprietary modifications, then we ask for a 10% royalty. Please ask me (liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu) for details.

Installation Services

Requirements

Compatibility

HyperNews should work with the standard CGI support provided by most Unix http servers; it is known to work with NCSA's httpd (get 1.5, or 1.5.2, but not 1.5.1), CERN's httpd, Apache, Netsite, and Plexus.

No port to NT, Windows, or Mac has been completed, that I know of. There are several messages below discussing this, especially regarding NT.

The internal security mechanism of NCSA's or CERN's httpd is used, and this same mechanism is not used with other servers, so you will have to either do some work to make the internal security work, or use "manual_security". Some work on support of Netscape DBM files has been done; see the $PWFileDBM option in the hnrc file.

If HyperNews is incompatible with the system you want to use, consider one of the other available conferencing systems.

Access Requirements

To install HyperNews, you will need to either have root access on your Unix system, be a web administrator, or have the web administrator do some configuration of the http server for you. This configuration will need to be done a couple times until things are working the way you want, and thereafter most things can be managed via HyperNews on the web rather than through the shell and file system.

If your server already allows you to create CGI bin directories or use CGI scripts, then that may be enough to go on. The main hurdle is that you need to set up a directory that the server can write in, but you probably don't want to allow just anyone to write in it.

Perl

All the software is entirely written in Perl, but it requires Perl 5. Perl 5.000 and 5.001 have problems - use 5.002 . 5.001m is also OK in most cases, but not 5.001n.

If the flush.pl file is found missing, then you have a badly installed Perl.

Socket.pm in your Perl 5 library is used by http.pl (part of the HyperNews distribution) to fetch documents via HTTP. For some operating systems, Socket.pm has problems, so you might want to try socket.ph instead. To do so, you'll need to translate the /usr/include files (using "cd /usr/include; h2ph * sys/*"), or at least translate sys/socket.h and whatever it requires. If sys/socket.ph exists but is not found by Perl, it could be a problem with your Perl installation. If execution errors result when sys/socket.ph is loaded via http.pl, this is not surprising. I recommend you just comment out the offending lines in sys/socket.ph or in one of the files it loads.

Disk Requirements

Frequently, people ask what the disk requirements for HyperNews are. There are no real surprises.
The source (which is what you run) takes less than 1 M. Each message takes the size of the message itself plus the overhead of the urc file (about 2K), a directory, if there are any replies, a list of all the replies, and a mailing list of subscribers. The mailing list is typically small or non-existent, except for at the base article level.

Server and Sendmail Configuration Assumptions

• The AccessFileName is assumed to be ".htaccess", the default for NCSA httpd, or ".www_acl" the default for CERN httpd, but you can change what HyperNews thinks the name is in your configuration file (hnrc). You don't need to create the access files for HyperNews yourself since it does this for you. You may want to check on it though.
• Symbolic links are used by HyperNews to link from either the unsecured directory (called HyperNews) or the secured directory (called HyperNews/SECURED, created by the setup process) to the common .scripts directory. So you need to enable symbolic links in your server configuration (access.conf for NCSA's server) for the HyperNews directory. If you don't want to do this, you can instead move the scripts into place and copy the library files they use.
• Maybe you should also look at your AllowOverride configuration in access.conf. We have "AllowOverride All" but that may be too generous.
• The default addesses used by HyperNews for email are "HyperNews" and "Owner-HyperNews". "HyperNews" is used for the visible recipient of email, i.e. the "To" header, since the real recipients are not listed in the headers. "Owner-HyperNews" is used as the envelope sender of messages and the "Errors-To" address, so reject mail (due to bad addresses, etc) will typically be sent there.

  These addresses may cause problems for your sendmail unless you add them to your system mail alias file, or change the addresses in your configuration file (hnrc) to something real, or disable outgoing email. Also be aware that reject mail will accumulate in the Owner-HyperNews mailbox, and HyperNews has no way yet of dealing with it. For more discussion on email issues, see the HyperNews Email page.