4. How do I maintain leafnode?

Now you have got a working news system up and running, but there are still some things to do. You may edit the file /usr/lib/leafnode/config to set the expire dates of your groups. This number means, when old messages should be deleted. The standard time of 20 days is much often too long if you read some groups with much traffic, 4 days or a week are in most cases a good time for your system. You may change the value for all groups ("expire = n" to hold all groups n days), but you tell leafnode to change this time for some separate groups writing
groupexpire foo.bar n
to set the expire time for the group foo.bar to n days.

This setting alone won't make leafnode deleting old messages, a separate program is responsible for this: texpire. It may be started as a cron job or by command line. If your computer is up all the time, you may want to add the following line to news' crontab file (to edit it, log in as news and type "crontab -e" or as type root "crontab -u news -e"):
0 19 * * * /usr/local/sbin/texpire
This line causes the cron daemon to star texpire every day at 19:00. Check the crontab manual page for further adjustment. If your computer is not regularly switched on, you may start texpire just from time to time, when you notice that fetch gets slower. It works fine as with the "cron-method".