Resolved – nntp//rss install

Goal: to use nntp//rss as an RSS aggregator, using either Blackdown JDK/JRE 1.4.1 or Sun SDK/JRE 1.4.2.

The main problem here comes in running the actual NNTP server. Normal users do not have access to the ports in use by the app. My initial thought was to create a script that could be executed from /etc/init.d as a daemon via the rc-update command. Alas, this wasn’t as simple as I hoped, and was abandoned.

The final solution was to perform a chmod a+s on both nntprss-start.jar and nntprss.jar, and to edit the nntprss-config.xml file to use a port larger than 1024. Something like 1199 instead of 119. The chmod command sets those files to be executed as though root were executing them, giving them access to modification of ports.