Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!cbnews!tgt
From: tgt@cbnews.ATT.COM (Tim Thompson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: private newsgroups
Keywords: newsgroups private
Message-ID: <657@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 13 Jul 88 18:58:18 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 34


I've received a request from a portion of our user community for a private
newgroup - one that only a certain group of users can read and post to. I'm
sure this has been done elsewhere, and have a good idea about how to do it,
but I'm interested in hearing how others have accomplished this.

Obviously, the FASCIST define in defs.h can be used to limit the number
of people who can post to a given group. According to the doc, however,
it does nothing to stop that group of people from reading the private
newsgroup. 

I can combined what has been called the SLEAZY approach with FASCIST
to accomplish the desired functionality. (Ever meet a sleazy fascist?)
By this, I mean that I can make /usr/spool/news/XXX mode 750 owned by 
news and with group YYY.  People who should be able to read the newsgroup 
would be put into group YYY.  News is happy because it has owner permission 
to write.  Only people with read access to the directory (i.e. members
of group YYY) can read the files in it. A minor modification will need
to be made to 'rn' - the error message tells me that "Newsgroups YYY has
not spool directory". It'll be easy enough to check errno and return
a better error message.

I've also been told that I could run notesfile in parallel with the 2.11 B
news for the private newsgroup, but this seems like more trouble than it's
worth.

My question, then, is as follows: Is there a more elegant way to implement
private newsgroups under 2.11 B news? These private newsgroups won't 
be transmitted anywhere else -they'll only live on this one machine.
The problem lies in that only a certain class of users should be allowed
to read and/or post to them.

				Waiting for the replies to come rolling in,
				    Tim Thompson
				    tgt@cbnews.ATT.COM