One of the greatest obstacles beginners may face is that INN requires a working network setup to function properly, even when running on a standalone host. Therefore, it is essential that your kernel supports TCP/IP networking when running INN, and that you have set up the loopback interface as explained in Chapter 5.
Next, you have to make sure that innd is started at boot time. The default INN installation provides a script file called boot in the /etc/news/ directory. If your distribution uses the SystemV-style init package, all you have to do is create a symbolic link from your /etc/init.d/inn file pointing to /etc/news/boot. For other flavors of init, you have to make sure /etc/news/boot is executed from one of your rc scripts. Since INN requires networking support, the startup script should be run after the network interfaces are configured.