Q:  How come feeds tell me they can't connect to me any more?

A:  When innd starts up it reads the hosts.nntp file and looks up the
IP addresses for all the entries mentioned there.  The problem is that
this data is dynamic (sometimes people change IP addresses), and innd
never goes back to check.  If your system stays up for days and one of
your feeds changes their IP address (or has a new CNAME), innd will
reject them.  Rich planed to handle this in INN1.5, but for now you
might find it useful to do a "ctlinnd reload hosts.nntp" out of cron
every day or so or when you notice there's a problem.

Here is a sample crontab entry to use: (news should run this)

55 7,12,17,22 * * * /usr/local/newsbin/ctlinnd -s reload hosts.nntp crontab

I hope people vary the time this runs.  If a huge number of INN hosts,
many running NTP so their clocks are within a few ms., all kick off DNS
lookups at exactly the same time, the internet traffic could get
"interesting".  Try setting the minutes value to the time you added
this entry to crontab rather than everyone using "55".  In fact, if
everyone used their birthday plus 1 if they are born on an odd month,
that would spread it out just fine.


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