Adding malta.* hierarchy to a news server

This document explains the mechanism through which the malta.* newsgroup hierarchy can be added to a news server, or how to configure your server to carry it properly if the malta.* groups are already present. It is intended for news administrators as well as Maltese users in Malta, Maltese users abroad and foreign users interested in aspects of Malta, trying to get their system administrators to get the malta.* groups. It was inspired by the "How to add pl.* hierarchy" document and other excellent FAQ's.
If you are a news user, please ask your news administrator whether he/she could arrange receiving the malta.* newsgroups, and send him this article or a pointer to the html version, at: http://www.malta.news-admin.org (or at http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/).

Please send any comments and/or updates to the author. News administrators who decide to carry malta.* are kindly asked to contact the author of this document, so a 'map' of malta.* can be drawn.

malta.* is the national hierarchy of Malta, currently under test. It is intended to be a low-volume feed so it should not present a burden on your news system.

The first newsgroup to be created was malta.test. For information contact cmeli@cis.um.edu.mt.

Policies will be created to avoid abusive messages, including moderation or robomoderation of newsgroups. There are other venues where this type of message is accepted and/or appreciated, however they will not be allowed in this hierarchy, again since most of them may be illegal under Maltese legislation.
Postings which fail to follow the guidelines may be cancelled by the malta.* hierarchy maintainer.
The following types of articles will not be allowed on all malta.* newsgroups:

Spam, Chain Letters, MLM's, Get Rich Schemes, Pyramid Schemes
Articles against the charter of a newsgroup
Personal attacks, name calling, indecency or defamation
Trolls - Messages which attact flames
Forgeries and Anonymous messages (except for nym type addresses, but they should post on topic)
Binaries - It is better to put these on the WWW or ftp and post pointers

Receiving the malta.* news hierarchy:

You must get the malta.* groups sent back to you
You must send the malta.* groups back (so users can POST)
Configure the hierarchy for the automatic creation of new groups
Appropriately handle posting to moderated groups

1. Receiving all the articles.

Contact the news administrator of a news server already carrying malta.* newsgroups. Try to find the nearest one to your Internet location. For this purpose the traceroute and ping -s commands can be used. Obviously it is best if malta.* groups are carried together with your normal or usual feed, but this may not be possible since the malta.* hierarchy is quite young, being created in the last days of August 1997. More and more servers are expected to be carrying the hierarchy soon. An example of a site offering access is newsguy.com.

This is the list of servers carrying malta.*, that I am aware of. It does not claim to be complete. Please note that these sites are not necessarily offering feeds to you.

MALTA           nntp.cis.um.edu.mt      
MALTA           news.waldonet.net.mt
SWITZERLAND     news-ge.switch.ch       
USA             news.newsguy.com         
UK		pubnews.netcom.net.uk/netcom.net.uk
UK              news.demon.co.uk
BELGIUM		newsfeed.online.be
BELGIUM		newsfeed.belnet.be

Can  any keyworld and satellite isp subscribers give any information
on whether the malta.* groups are carried by them?  And whether
they are configured properly. This faq can help check their configuration.
An easy way to confirm is to test in malta.test and on-topic in the other
malta.* groups.
CONFIRMED: waldonet is configured properly, confirmed by postings

First of all send email to your existing feed's news administrator to see if he can feed you the malta.* hierarchy. If not you probably will need to send email to one of the above news administrators. In this email include your news server addresses:

  - the internet address of your server
  - its 'news name' i.e. the string you use in the 'Path:' header

In reply you should receive the appropriate hostname/news name for the host you will be receiving malta.* articles from. The first will be exactly as in the list e.g. sample.site.mt, but the "Path:" is quite different normally e.g. "news.mt". You should get the current list of all malta.* groups that you ought to create manually. This list is also posted regularly to malta.announce and malta.news.announce newsgroups.

2. Sending news to malta.*

Unless you are receiving malta.* groups through your mainstream feed, you will need to do some reconfiguring to send them back out. Then even if you are getting them through your mainstream feed, you will need to make sure that they are being included in the list of groups sent back out.

When you ask for a malta.* newsfeed and you receive it, you also get permission to send all malta.* groups back. In your 'newsfeeds' file (in innd it is newsfeeds. in cnews it is called sys) add an appropriate entry for sending malta.* groups back. Use the pathhost name that you got to build the entry. In our previous example it was news.mt. It might look like:

  maltanews/news.mt\

     :!*,malta.*\

	 :Tf,Wnm:

Replace news.mt by whatever appears in the Path: field put by your feeding site. You must also remember to tell your cronjob which sends news to send them also to your feeding site e.g. feed.site.mt. If you use nntpsend/innxmit add to your nntpsend.ctl file:

  maltanews:feed.site.mt:::-T1720 -t300
  ^         ^              ^
  |         |              + other parameters
  |         FQDN address of your feeding site/provider
  +--Name used in newsfeeds file

That should be all. Post a test message to malta.test. At present I am aware of the following autoresponder: nobody@crosslink.net (ignores any article with "ignore" in the Subject line)

In your control.ctl file:

To get all the new malta.* groups created and removed automatically when required, you are asked to add the following to the control.ctl file:

newgroup:cmeli@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:doit=newgroup

rmgroup:cmeli@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:doit=rmgroup

The above is if you are not able to PGP check control messages. It is recommended now however, that if possible you install and use pgpverify (or the equivalent software for your system) to be able to check control messages you receive for the malta.* hierarchy. INN 1.5.1 and later support PGP control messages by default. Once you install pgpverify and you have obtained the PGP public key mentioned below you will be able to change the above-mentioned two lines in control.ctl to:

newgroup:cmeli@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:verify-malta.config
rmgroup:cmeli@cis.um.edu.mt:malta.*:verify-malta.config

New malta.* newsgroups will be created after discussion on malta.config once general consensus is reached. No voting procedures are in place at present - we will only require general consensus. In special situations (current events) special newsgroups may be created by the maintainer under malta.current-events.* Such events may be world-wide.

Authorized newgroup, rmgroup, and checkgroups control messages will be sent by the following Sender only:

  cmeli@cis.um.edu.mt

Newgroup and rmgroup control messages for malta.* groups will be PGP-signed using the PGP public key with user id "malta-config", which may be obtained by sending e-mail to pgp-public-keys@pgp.ai.mit.edu with the subject "GET 0x5020AB79" and an empty body; alternatively it may be obtained from the web at the following URL

	http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/PGP.PUBLICKEY

The public key can also be found here:


  Key user ID: 2048/5020AB79 2000/08/25 malta.config
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.6.2i
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=lVXx
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Is there any 'checkgroups' message for malta.* groups?

Yes, there is. It gets posted automatically once every two months so you should not see it very frequently. In addition you may get the list of malta.* groups in the 'newsgroups' file format from the URL

	http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/malta.newsgroups

and feed it to the 'docheckgroups' program.

The portion of the 'active' file containing just malta.* groups can be retrieved from the URL

	http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/news-malta/malta.active

To keep in sync you can just download the malta.newsgroups file above and feed it directly into the docheckgroups program. This should produce a series of 'ctlinnd newgroup' lines which can be fed into the shell for execution ( e.g. cat malta.newsgroups | docheckgroups | sh ).

Moderators file:

All posting to moderated groups under malta.* should be sent to newsgroup-name@cis.um.edu.mt (with hyphens replacing dots in the newsgroup name). So to your moderators file please add the following somewhere before the default "*:%s@uunet.uu.net":

  malta.*:%s@cis.um.edu.mt

Newest Newsgroup Status

The most recent new newsgroup is: malta.current-events.usa-bombing. It is unmoderated, for the discussion of the recent events in the USA. The malta.news.admin newsgroup is obsolete and has been deleted. It should be removed from every site carrying the malta.* groups. malta.news.announce is the replacement for this newsgroup. It may take up to ten days for your news provider to carry the new groups. If it still does not appear on the refreshed list, ask your news provider to create the group manually.

Charters/FAQs of malta.* newsgroups

This new section replaces an earlier one which linked to Deja (now http://groups.google.com). Googl has mixed most of the groups now.
malta.config - Discussion of new newsgroups in malta.* (robomoderated)
malta.announce - Announcements concerning malta.*, Malta and the Maltese
malta.beatification - Newsgroup about the beatification of Maltese including Dun Gorg Preca, Adeodata Pisani and Nazju Falzon (robomoderated)
malta.comp - Computing, Informatics, IT and Internet in Malta
malta.news.announce - For FAQ's,announcements, etc within the MALTA Hierarchy (moderated)
malta.fan.trekwho - Star Trek and Doctor Who (same as the TREKWHO-L mailing list)
malta.fan.x-files - The X-Files (robomoderated)
malta.test - Testing in the malta.* hierarchy
malta.media.radio - Radio in Malta. Ir-Radju f'Malta
malta.media.tv - TV in Malta. It-televizjoni f'Malta
malta.media.misc - The Media in Malta

Reading the malta.* groups through Newsguy.com

Direct Read News - malta.*

USENET Archive

A comprehensive USENET archive of malta.* postings is kept at MNR.

Thanks and Credits

Thanks goes to everyone who has contributed or indirectly helped this project. Thanks goes to Nick Andrew and David Formosa for kindly delegating and donating the use of malta.news-admin.org.