Leafnode stable version and patches

Leafnode Stable Versions

Leafnode 1.11 is an IPv6-enabled drop-in replacement for leafnode 1.10 and leafnode 1.9.

leafnode 1.11 is a stable release, that means that it will not change except for bugfixes or documentation.

Additionally, leafnode-1 is in maintenance mode, that means, no features will be added (these all go into the 2.0 tree), only bug fixes will be made as bugs are discovered.

Current release

Previous releases, discontinued and unsupported

1.11.7 (released 2009-04-20)

WORKAROUND

fetchnews: If the LN_SUPPRESS_DATE environment variable is defined and set to any value or empty, fetchnews will not test the upstream server's time by means of the "DATE" NNTP command. This can be used to quench related log messages.

BUGFIXES

Fix logging if texpire unlinks files without further hardlinks from message.id/NNN/
Fix potential segfault on libcs that do not catch NULL for %s formatting (several GNU libc versions do) when trying to retrieve delayed bodies from corrupt article headers. Pretend success, to purge article number from subscription file. Bug reported by Chris Carr.
Fix & change "noactive" so that it can be overridden by "fetchnews -f", as documented in config.example. Regression as side effect of 1.9.50 fix, reported by Jesse F. Hughes.
Fix logged IP address in "connected to..., reply:" message when compiled without IPv6 support. Fixes Mandriva Bug #45605, reported by David W. Hodgins.
Print connected to... to console as well at proper verbosity level, found by maintainer while debugging aforementioned bug.
Only emit warning that no server with posting permission was found if that's actually needed. Reported by Christian Weiske.
If corrupted articles had been detected, fetchnews -x NNN would not be able to re-fetch the said article because a 0-sized file remained in message.id, making fetchnews believe the article was in the spool. 0-sized message.id/NNN/ files are now purged when checking if the article is already in the spool. Reported by Peter Bauernfeind. (de.comm.software.newsserver post, May 2008)
Change interface enumeration to track incompatible NetBSD 5 changes. The latter led to bogus connection refusals in NNTPD. SourceForge Bug #2700756, by Aleksey Cheusov, fix suggested by Roy Marples.
Add support for SIOCGIFALIAS where available (BSD) in order to obtain netmasks for 4.4BSD-style IP aliases. getifaddrs() has been suggested as well, but it isn't available everywhere, so we would have to keep the old code around anyways, and we can just fix that rather than introduce alternative code branches.

BUGFIXES BACKPORTED FROM LEAFNODE 2

lsort (used by make update) now detects and report errors.
"make update" handles the lockfile properly now: it records its PID and removes the lock also in cases of failure.
"make update" restores the old groupinfo file if lsort fails.
"make update" now builds an up-to-date lsort first.
"make update" now uses the configured NEWS_USER and _GROUP.
"make update" is now a phony Makefile target, i. e. it will work even if there is a file "update" in the build directory.

CHANGES

When creating a Path: header (because the newsreader did not do that), use "not-for-mail" instead of NEWS_USER (usually "news") as the user component. This seems to resolve propagation issues with 2nd-hop-upstreams, as reported in Debian Bug#459980 by Michael Weitzel, with Universität Siegen, Germany.
When writing to client fails, log decoded errno, too. This can help debugging certain firewall misconfigurations more easily.
Undoing a wordwrap in configure.ac allows for bootstrapping on Cygwin.
Drop obsolete mysetvbuf().
leafnode-version now supports an additional "-v" mode to print more information on the installation. The output then is similar, but not identical - due to different feature sets - to the way leafnode-2 prints it.

DOCUMENTATION

Add some comments to UNINSTALL-daemontools
Put README-FQDN* under leafnode's license. Found to be in conflict with Debian's DFSG by Mark Brown.

1.11.6 (released 2007-03-17)

BUGFIXES

.site TLDs are refused in FQDN.
apply patch from Georg Schwarz to fix compilation with SGI IDO cc.
do not delete articles if the References: lines are malformatted. Reported by Adam Funk.
support autoconf 2.60, fixing datarootdir-related warnings.

DOCUMENTATION

fix minor typos in README-FQDN.
minor changes to INSTALL.

1.11.5 (released 2006-04-09)

BUGFIXES

Fix logging of invalid FQDH/FQDN.
Do not trash delaybody download markers if the interesting.group/* files are writeable by NEWS_USER ("news") but owned by somebody else. Found debugging a problem described by David Aldred.
Some syslog messages were still logged at LOG_DEBUG priority without debugmode set.
Support noactive = 0. Reported by Rafal Maj, Debian Bug #329760.
Support nodesc = 0.
Keep non-expiring groups (negative groupexpire date) in active file even if they have expired upstream. Sourceforge Bug #1230256, Thomas Zajic.
INSTALL: leafnode needs a "news" group as well. Found by Julien Sansonnens.
Allow unterminated lines in regular files. Found by Ivo Maintz.
Applyfilter unfolds headers before matching, to match fetchnews behavior.
Applyfilter no longer unconditionally removes messages without body if delaybody is off. The interesting.groups/group.name file might still have pointers so that fetchnews will download the bodies later.

CHANGES

"killed nnn (<mess@ge.id>), already fetched before" messages have been demoted to debug priority, to avoid syslog spamming with multiple upstream servers or after crashes. Reported by Adam Funk.
The RPM is now accompanied by a -debuginfo package.
Build "grouplist" program in "make check".
The fetchnews manual pages states that -f is not to be used in cron jobs.
The filtering documentation (applyfilter(8) man page and filters.example) was overhauled, at the suggestion of Michael R. McCarrey. Mike also courteously provided additional filter examples with documentation.

WEBSITE

http://www.leafnode.org/ is now served by SourceForge's VHOST service and thus serves the same content as http://leafnode.sourceforge.net/

1.11.4 (released 2005-11-23)

BUGFIXES

Skip server processing when posting articles fails, for instance, because of a protocol error or server disconnect/timeout. Bug found when analyzing Debian #318644.
Do not mark the active for refetch when the failed server has "noread" set or fetchnews is in -P (post only) mode. Patch by Brian Sammon.

COMPATIBILITY CHANGE

GNU coreutils 5.92 are broken and can no longer create a missing directory with "mkdir -p missing/." Work around the bug. Reported by Michael Shigorin.

DOCUMENTATION

Switch FAQ.pdf formatting back to XSL stylesheets and RenderX XEP 4.4, now that a personal license for OpenSource documentation is available.
Renamed all CAN-YYYY-NNNN to CVE-YYYY-NNNN in leafnode-SA-*.txt, ChangeLog, NEWS and OLDNEWS to chase the CVE database change of 2005-10-19.

1.11.3 (released 2005-06-08)

SECURITY BUGFIX

Fetchnews did not detect timeouts while it was downloading an article header, which malicious upstream servers could exploit to mount a denial of service attack against the fetchnews client. See leafnode-SA-2005-02.txt. CVE Name: CVE-2005-1911

BUGFIX

Bugfix sed expression in makesubst script. (Reported by Jeff Zacharias.)

CHANGES

texpire now tags the message.id expired count with "message.id" rather than "total:" to avoid misleading the user who assumes that "total:" would have to be the sum of the group counts. See also the FAQ change below. SourceForge bug #1215453.
When debugmode and verbose mode are set, leafnode programs now print a warning to stdout that the user should check syslog.conf and the syslog output rather than the screen print for debugging and sleeps for three seconds.

DOCUMENTATION

Add FAQ entry to explain discrepancies between texpire group counts and message.id expired articles counts.
Add FAQ entry to explain influence of Gnus' gnus-read-active-file setting on lost subscriptions, and extend stop fetchnews from unsubscribing FAQ. Debian bug #307685.
Drop FAQ entry on license issues as some parts of leafnode are in fact GPLd.
Drop FAQ entry on why old articles aren't posted, obsolete since 1.9.33.
INSTALL and INSTALL_de have been polished.
Add a hint that syslog.conf must be edited to config.example.
leafnode(8) mentions that LIST ACTIVE keeps an existing subscription fresh.

1.11.2 (released 2005-05-04)

SECURITY BUGFIXES

For these two bugs together, the CVE Name is CVE-2005-1453. For further cross-references, see http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2005-1453.

Fix fetchnews segfault when connection to server dies while fetchnews is reading an article body (use-after-free bug). Regression introduced into leafnode v1.9.52. Denial of service possible, see leafnode-SA-2005-01.txt.
Fix fetchnews segfault when connection to server dies while fetchnews is reading an article header. Regression in security fix of leafnode v1.9.48. Denial of service possible, see leafnode-SA-2005-01.txt

BUGFIXES

fetchnews will no longer re-fetch the active file for a server if it has been completely received even if fetching articles from this server encounters a problem. Long-standing bug. Debian bug #70052.
fetchnews will now properly mark the active for complete re-fetch if it says so. Previously, it forgot the mark in some circumstances.
A problem fetching the active file or descriptions for a newly added server will now mark the active for re-fetch even if articles have successfully been retrieved from the same server.

DOCUMENTATION

Repair two lines in the German leafnode(8) manual page that became invisible as they ran together with a .PP macro.

1.11.1 (released 2005-04-25)

BUGFIX

Fix pluralization bug in "n article[s] posted" message, Debian bug #303157.
Fix other pluralization bugs.
Update address of web site in pseudo article, reported by Daniel Zwick.

PORTABILITY

Backport leafnode-2 code to prefer /usr/xpg4/bin/id (if present) to /usr/bin/id, to improve portability to Solaris and avoid bogus warnings during ./configure.

DOCUMENTATION

Remove TODO file.
Update documentation and addresses of mailing lists and web sites, there have been obsolete links around in code, pseudo article and documentation.
Add missing IPv6 hints to README files.
Add incompatibility hint WRT configuration parser to README files.
Clarify differences between global and server-specific parameters in leafnode(8) manual pages.

1.11.0 (released 2005-03-16)

INCOMPATIBLE BUGFIXES

fetchnews now supports IPv6 (this causes the version bump to 1.11)
the configuration parser now supports quoted strings on the right-hand side, so that "#" can be used in passwords. See the section CONFIGURATION in leafnode(8) for details.

BUGFIX

Fix snprintf test that caused leafnode to always use the local snprintf rather than the system's. Bug found by Bruno Rohee. Regression in leafnode-1.10.7, though with no user-visible effect.

For the history between 1.9.20 and 1.10.8, please see the OLDNEWS.html file.

The files offered below contain a PCRE package to ease installation, but it is recommended to get the current PCRE package from http://www.pcre.org/ and build and install that prior to building leafnode.

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Files

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