NNTP (USENET) and SSL HOWTO

Read the Pegasus Mail (POP3) and SSL HOWTO for the background information.

Table of contents

Gathering Software

The required pieces of the puzzle are:

Setup

stunnel setup

What is stunnel? Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) available on both Unix and Windows. In accordance to its Unix roots, the Windows port of stunnel is a bare-bones console program. No fancy bells, whistles, or help files. Just 38K of text, text, and more text.

  1. Download the latest Windows binary.
  2. Download the two pre-compiled SSL libraries (near the bottom of the page with the stunnel binary) into the windows/system/ directory.
  3. Drop to an MS-DOS box (command prompt), change to the Pegasus Mail directory, and execute this command:

You should see something similar to:

2001.11.27 18:53:25 LOG5[16310699:16474727]: Using 'news.u.washington.edu.563' as tcpwrapper service name
2001.11.27 18:53:27 LOG5[16310699:16474727]: stunnel 3.22 on 
x86-pc-mingw32-gnu WIN32 with OpenSSL 0.9.6b 9 Jul 2001
2001.11.27 18:53:27 LOG5[16310699:16474727]: FD_SETSIZE=4096, file ulimit=-1 (unlimited) -> 2000 clients allowed
Congratulations, you've created a SSL tunnel

Minimize the window and continue to the next step.

Agent setup

Setup is simple on the Agent side:

User tab

 

1) Open up the "User and System Profile" screen (Under the "Options" menu item).

2) Change the radio button to "Log in with a username and password". DO NOT choose the bottom radio button.

3) Click the "System" tab.
System tab

 

4) Change the "News server" to localhost.

You're done! Try reading some messages.

Using

I written two small batch files to simplify the stunnel process. The files assume that stunnel and the file reside in the same directory as Agent.
  1. stunnel + Agent
  2. stunnel only
Or download this ZIP file with both batch files.

Links


Last updated: 1/25/02
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