Compatibility Requirements

The following sections describe the basic requirements on your system that determine whether you might be able to run HyperNews.

If HyperNews is incompatible with the system you want to use, and you can't help port it, consider asking to set up a forum on one of the existing HyperNews sites. Or look into one of the other available conferencing systems.

Unix Operating System

A Unix system is required, although almost any modern Unix will do. If there are problems with some versions of Unix that can be worked around without too much strain, please let me know.

No port to Windows (3.1, 95, 98, or NT), or Mac has been completed, that I know of. There are several messages in this forum discussing this, especially regarding NT. In principal, HyperNews could probably be made to work on non-Unix systems without extreme difficulty, but I don't have time to do that work now.

To install HyperNews, it will be easier if you have root access on your Unix system, but this is not necessary.

Perl 5

All the software is entirely written in Perl, and it requires some features of Perl 5. Perl 5.000 and 5.001 have problems - please use at least 5.002. (5.001m is also OK in most cases, but not 5.001n.)

If the flush.pl file is found missing, then you have a badly installed Perl.

Socket.pm in your Perl 5 library is used by http.pl (included in the HyperNews distribution) to fetch documents via HTTP. For some operating systems, Socket.pm has problems, so you might want to try socket.ph instead. To do so, you'll need to translate the /usr/include files (using "cd /usr/include; h2ph * sys/*"), or at least translate sys/socket.h and whatever it requires. If sys/socket.ph exists but is not found by Perl, it could be a problem with your Perl installation. If execution errors result when sys/socket.ph is loaded via http.pl, this is not surprising. I recommend you just comment out the offending lines in sys/socket.ph or in one of the files it loads.

Apache's mod_perl module does not yet work with HyperNews. There are a number of changes to HyperNews' use of packages that must be changed first.

HTTP Server

HyperNews should work with the standard CGI support provided by most Unix http servers; it is known to work with Apache, NCSA's httpd, CERN's httpd (not recommended), and Netsite.

The internal security mechanism of Apache, NCSA or CERN httpd may be used optionally, but this same mechanism is not always used with other servers, so you will have to either do some work to make the internal security work, or use "manual_security". Some work on support of "external security" via Netscape DBM files has been done; see the $PWFileDBM option in the hnrc file. Also some SQL database and socket access of member info is supported; see member-lib.pl.

For installation of HyperNews, it will help if you either are the web administrator or you can have the web administrator do some configuration of the http server for you. This configuration may need to be done a couple times until things are working the way you want. After installing HyperNews, many things can be managed via the web rather than through a telnet command line shell, but I don't generally recommend relying on only the web interface.

But even without the above, if your server already allows you to create CGI bin directories or use CGI scripts (most servers do), then that may be enough to go on. The main hurdle is that you need to set up a directory that the server can write in, but you probably don't want to allow just anyone to write in it. The installation instructions describe some techniques that may help you restrict who can access files in your installation, e.g. cgiwrap and setuid.

Certain things may be required of your HTTP server configuration.

If you use "internal" server-based security, there are several things to be aware of. The AccessFileName is assumed to be ".htaccess", the default for NCSA httpd, or ".www_acl" the default for CERN httpd, but you can change what HyperNews thinks the name is in your configuration file (hnrc). You don't need to create the access files for HyperNews yourself since it does this for you. You may want to check on it though.

Symbolic links are used by HyperNews to link to the shared .scripts directory from either the unsecured directory (called HyperNews) or the secured directory (called HyperNews/SECURED, this is created by the setup process). So you need to enable symbolic links in your server configuration (access.conf for NCSA's server) for the HyperNews directory. If you don't want to do this, you can instead copy the scripts into place using the --copy option to the setup.pl script. Or hard links are created if you use the --hardlink option. (Hardlinks are required if you use the Apache suExec feature.)
Maybe you should look at your AllowOverride configuration in access.conf. I generally use "AllowOverride All" but that is probably too generous.

Disk Requirements

Frequently, people ask what the disk requirements for HyperNews are. There are no real surprises, but total space for an active forum can grow very large as the number of messages grows.

The source (which is what you run) takes about 1M. Each message takes the size of the message itself plus the overhead of the urc file (about 2K), a directory, if there are any replies, a list of all the replies, a mailing list of subscribers, a log file (for each forum), and a hit count file. The mailing list is typically small or non-existent, except for at the base article level.

Sendmail Configuration

The default addesses used by HyperNews for email are "HyperNews" and "Owner-HyperNews". "HyperNews" is used for the visible recipient of email, i.e. the "To" header, since the real recipients are not listed in the headers. "Owner-HyperNews" is used as the envelope sender of messages and the "Errors-To" address, so reject mail (due to bad addresses, etc) will typically be sent there.

These addresses may cause problems for your sendmail unless you add them to your system mail alias file, or change the addresses in your configuration file (hnrc) to something real, or disable outgoing email. Also be aware that reject mail will accumulate in the Owner-HyperNews mailbox, and HyperNews has no way yet of dealing with it. For more discussion on email issues, see the HyperNews Email page.