INN requires a special cron job to be set up on your system to run the news.daily script, which performs daily server maintenance tasks such as article expiration and the processing and rotation of the server logs. Since it will slow the server down while it is running, it should be run during periods of low server usage, such as in the middle of the night. To run it at 3am, for example, add the following entry to the news user's crontab file:
0 3 * * * /usr/local/news/bin/news.daily expireover lowmark
or, if your system does not have per-user crontabs, put the following line into your system crontab instead:
0 3 * * * su -c "/usr/local/news/bin/news.daily expireover lowmark" news
If you use the batching method to send news, also set up a cron job to run nntpsend every ten minutes. nntpsend will run innxmit for all non-empty pending batch files to send pending news to your peers. That cron entry should look something like:
0,10,20,30,40,50 * * * * /usr/local/news/bin/nntpsend
The pathnames and user ID used above are the installation defaults; change them to match your installation if you used something other than the defaults.
The parameters passed to news.daily in the above example are the most common (and usually the most efficient) ones to use. More information on what these parameters do can be found in the news.daily man page.