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ClariNet Administration Guide

We're glad to welcome your site as a ClariNet subscriber. This administrator's guide tells you the things you'll need to do to administer a ClariNet feed at your site. Before you read this guide, you may wish to read the ClariNet installation guide, which is on the web or available as the read.me file in the ClariNet administration kit.

Administration of ClariNet is designed to be simple. If you're already administering USENET, the extra effort is minimal.

If you have a site licence, there is no need to put special protection on the material. It need only be given the same protections that other material private to your machine is given.

To start ClariNet, you need simply run a script, provided by ClariNet, to create the appropriate newsgroups. Do this as you would to start up USENET. Then ClariNet will arrange for your chosen feed site to start sending you material in the same way you receive USENET material.

The ClariNet awk script actually outputs a /bin/sh script to create the groups for the three main news transport systems. It takes on the standard input a "checkgroups" style file which we provide you.

Then announce ClariNet to your users, reminding them that it is copyrighted material, and that this copyright should be respected. Point them to our set of user terms (described below) as well as our detailed group lists and the postings in clari.net.newusers.

(We repost the material in clari.net.newusers every month, but if you want to start the users off with a fresh set of postings, you can take the news batch found in the admin kit as newuser.Z and feed it into your news processing system.)

Admin Kit

The ClariNet administrator's kit is available for FTP from ftp.clari.net. You can get the latest info and scripts from this site, particularly in the help/admin directory. These days, however, all information is primarily on the web site.

In general, we do not allow sites to feed other customers unless they are a contracted and approved hub site (for example, UUNet). Feeds should definitely never be set up without explicit approval from us. Be sure you're not feeding ClariNet to any site not covered by your site licence. Make sure there are comments in your feed files to remind other or subsequent admins about this.

Auditing

We will contact you from time to time to make sure our information on you is up to date. If you are willing to work with us on interesting readership projects, let us know.

Be sure to keep us informed on the news servers you keep ClariNet on, including their "USENET" names (in Path: lines) and their fully qualified domain names (FQDN) if that is different.

Also be sure to keep us informed on the top level domains at your site so our web servers can identify your users and direct them to the right data.

You can mail changes to audit@clari.net.

Newsreaders

We recommend you upgrade to the latest newsreaders, such as trn 4.0. These can usually handle MIME, and our graphic articles come in MIME. The clari.web tree comes in all-HTML and is handled best by the newsreader in Netscape Navigator, now the most popular newsreader on the net.

Terms

Be sure to read the group clari.net.admin for announcements important to news administrators. Any changes in the ClariNet terms will be pre-announced there. You can also read them at the terms web page

Moderated Groups

ClariNet groups are marked as ``moderated'', which means that users may not post to them. Unlike USENET moderated groups, users are not even supposed to contribute. Any posting made by a user should be bounced, possibly with a note informing the user of this. We would appreciate it if you did not forward postings to us, although we can handle them if need be.

As such, the mailpaths file should point to an local auto-reply message for all ClariNet moderated groups. C news users can simply mark the groups as do-not-post with the ``n'' active file flag. You can also point the mailpaths file at the address modreply@clari.net if you can't easily set up a local daemon.

Educating your users and boosting readership

To get the most out of ClariNet at your site, you need to do your best to tell your users about it and ideally put in some tools to give them different means of access. Today the net is so vast that users won't find data unless they are pointed at it.

When you start your ClariNet feed, if you have a sitewide newsgroup for announcements, you'll naturally want to make an announcement there, and point them to the group lists, documentation and terms. We also hope you'll remind them about the difference between copyrighted ClariNet news and regular USENET material.

These days, most user education and pointing is done with the web, even for people using newsreaders. (The most popular newsreader today is actually Netscape Navigator's newsreader.) We have a variety of web pages you should point your users to or install on your system. In addition, we have some software tools that you can use to liven up your own web site, bring people into the news and help them get more out of your system.

Web Interface

Probably most important is that you look into putting up a web interface to the news. We have two different tools for you to select from.

ClariCGI

ClariCGI is a CGI/FastCGI program written in C that will provide a customizable web-interface to both ClariNet and USENET. It works with both the regular and clari.web feeds. You can alter the look of groups and articles if you wish, plus provide URLs that fetch articles that match certain queries from the news spool. Ie. you can have a "Today's Doonesbury" link.

Web Extract

Our web extract system provides a set of tools that will unpack an incoming clari.web news feed into a set of stand-alone web pages that can be served up with an ordinary web server. It also has CGI programs to serve up newsgroup menus.

Live Photo

You can arrange to put a live photo up on your home page, making it like the front page of a newspaper. Nothing draws people into a site like a current and colourful news photo. Our photograb perl script will extract the latest news or sports photo, caption and headline in a way you can easily insert them into your home page or another page. And you can link from the photo or headline to a news page or the story shown. See the ClariNet Home Page for an example.

Top Story Summary

Three times a day, ClariNet puts out a short summary item with the top stories in six categories, ideal for putting on a home page. You will find them in the group clari.web.xcache.links, ready to unpack and store on a web page. A ClariCGI query like: this will fetch it (you may not have permission on our server).

ClariNet Manual

Link users to the ClariNet Documentation and to the ClariNet Home Page for more information

Terms of service

You need to make users aware of the basics of our terms of service. We have a summary of the terms of service for readers on our web page for you to do this. An ASCII version, if you need it is on our ftp site.

Menus of Newsgroups

Users have to be able to find newsgroups to read them, and while there are mechanisms to do that in most newsreaders, they aren't very good. You'll want to make some others available. Off the ClariNet web page you will find our newsgroup menu or newstree page. This page guides users to menus of newsgroups, but it requires them to know which edition they have. You should go there, and pick the right tree or trees for the edition you have, and put them up on your web page.

If you use these trees -- indeed if any of your users use the Netscape newsreader or other readers -- it's a good idea to make sure that your news server is named "news" in your local domain or has an alias of that name. That's because this is the default server most newsreaders try to access, and if you set this up, your users don't have to configure anything. You can make an alias in your DNS records with a "CNAME" record.

If you put up a web interface, you'll want to get a tree from us that points to that. Contact us for one. It should reside on your server because it points to your server, however it is possible for it just to be a copy of a page we put up on our system.

Be sure as well to tell users to read clari.net.announce for news about ClariNet.

Let us help you

Let us give you a hand setting this up. While we don't have permission to access your servers, we can take your web pages and add our links and features to them, and guide you in selecting and installing any tools you need. Contact our web page support department at admin-support@clari.net

Identifying your users to us

When your users come to our web site, we want to be able to spot them. This allows us to greet them as a subscriber and to give them access to data that is kept on our web site rather than served via NNTP. Many users visit our web site without knowing that their site is providing ClariNet news to them, and you can change that.

We've established a system that allows you to list for us the IP addresses of your users, as well as useful URLs on your web site for us to link back to. It starts by making sure we have a listing of your major domain names in our customer records, but the rest you can maintain on your own. Read out domain registration guide for details.

Technical Support

Technical support on ClariNet is available to you, the netnews administrator. Your users should not contact ClariNet directly for technical support or to report problems. Instead, they should work with you or other support staff at your site. You can then contact admin-support@clari.net to work out any problems. Particularly when it comes to feed delays or other problems local to your site, it is important they do this.

You and your users can contact us on editorial matters by mailing to editor@clari.net. Users can also post questions to clari.net.talk

E-mailing news

It is permitted to arrange for E-mail forwarding of ClariNet news to users on your site who are part of the "networker" population that was counted to work out your site licence price. Remember that while the networker count we use in pricing normally only includes users of electronic conferencing software such as USENET, if you wish to gateway to E-mail, the networker count can increase significantly.

If you do this, you must be sure of two things:

a) It should not be possible for users outside your site, or users at your site not in the networker population, to get on the E-mail forwarding lists. That means most "list server" software is not suitable, unless you have licenced all e-mail users at your site, and your list server knows how to limit lists to just your site.

b) You must make sure that e-mail problems, such as bounced messages, vacation notes and other replies will not make it back to the E-mail addresses in the From: line of ClariNet news articles. This usually means you have to rewrite the From: line or a Reply-to: line to send any replies to your own administrators. This means that any genuine replies will also come to your own addresses, and you can forward them manually on to us.

This is quite important. As you might expect, we can't do mailing list administration for each customer that wishes to make a gateway, and if our own special mailboxes meant for messages from subscribers get filled with mailer bounce messages, we may have no choice but to immediately cut off your feed to stop them.

Getting the News Quickly

Our systems work to feed sites as quickly as possible, and we generally have two sites perform feeding so that one is a backup. If you get your feed from a hub site, they are responsible for getting it to you quickly, we do what we can to get the news quickly to them.

You will find, however, that unlike ordinary USENET news, people care a lot about the timeliness of ClariNet news. If your news server is often getting overloaded and slowing down news due to full disks or high system load, you might want to consider a special server just for ClariNet news, which could also feed your main server. ClariNet's feed is not tiny, but it's much smaller than a full USENET feed, and even a personal Unix workstation can receive a feed with minimal burden.

We track your feed, but if you have any probelms with it, please contact us. You can also track the status of your feed any time from our feed status page.

Archiving

You may wish to archive ClariNet material. Articles with explicit "Expires" dates, such as Reuters, may not be archived beyond their expiration date. If you have full text search software, you may find it makes a good match with your archive of ClariNet news -- you can still search even Reuters material until it expires.

Feed Hubs

ClariNet feeds are available from many commercial UUCP and TCP/IP providers, Including UUNET, PSI and most other regional hubs. Contact us for a current list or see our web page (http://www.clari.net). However, today we discourage feeding from hubs, and would much rather feed you directly, so we can track and control the quality of the feed.

Summary

Here are things you must do to be on our network.

Make sure you're not feeding ClariNet groups to anybody not authorized.
Make sure you are running our auditing Makefile or some equivalent.
Follow instructions in our software-specific pages about news configuration files, ME: lines, NNTP access and so on. sites.
Make sure the "ME:" line in your news configuration is set to accept ClariNet articles and your edition's ClariNet distribution.
Read clari.net.admin or ask to be put on the admin-notice mailing list.
Put comments in your news feed and newsreader access control files to make sure other admins are aware of the rules.
Make sure your NNTP servers have no leaks -- check nntp_access.
Use extreme care in gatewaying news to E-mail.
Be sure somebody at your site will respond to audit requests posted to clari.net.admin and the admin-notice mailing list.
Keep us up to date on relevant changes in staff, feeds and local site size. Mail to audit@clari.net.
Make sure that your users are aware of our terms for users. Put a link to our user terms sheet in your own policy section.

Here are things that are very good ideas:

Put pointers to the news up on your main web page.
If your site can do it, work with us to produce actual ClariNet readership estimates.
Allow automatic newgroups from us using the new PGP signed newgroup method system described in the INN guide.
Point entries for moderated groups in your mailpaths file to an auto-reply daemon at your site or modreply@clari.net.
Make sure your users are informed of ClariNet changes and encouraged to read clari.net.announce. Help them with the software tools and software changes they need. Make a link to our web page and user manual.
Put up a web interface to the news so users not familiar with USENET can read it.