Welcome to the Leafnode homepage!

Introduction

Leafnode is a software package that implements a store & forward NNTP proxy (client and server) that supports TCP connections across IPv4 and IPv6. It can be used to give a regular newsreader off-line functionality, merge news articles from several upstream newsservers for newsreaders that only support one server well and avoid duplicate news download for a small LAN with multiple users reading news.

Leafnode is intended for use at home or in small offices. Scalability for large user or newsgroup counts has not been a design goal.

Leafnode is easy to install, requires no maintenance and can run unattended. It will recover from most problems without user intervention if possible. No configuration of a newsfeed at the upstream server is necessary, leafnode looks to the upstream server like a regular newsreader program.

Leafnode will automatically figure which newsgroups are read locally and will download them, and it will stop downloading from these newsgroups if they haven't been read locally. It allows for simple filters to limit the number of articles downloaded, the size or exclude articles with particular headers (Perl-compatible regular expression match). It has a mode to optionally download only headers in a first run, lets the user mark these through his newsreader (note that not all newsreaders will work) and download the full article texts in the next run.

Leafnode works perfectly with most common newsreaders either via NNTP or with traditional spool access.

Leafnode is an Open-Source package and runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and probably most Unix flavours.