On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, you wrote:
> Why is this a problem? They are both nntp servers after all, they both
> talk using the same protocol(*)
As you noted, there are two modes. Note also that INN is a very
un-symmetrical protocol, with a clear client and server role.
In the basic NNTP mode, news are pushed from one site to the other.
In reader mode, the client asks the server for news.
> In fact, it isn't AFAICT necessary to
> have one local and the other remote;
I use the term "local" and "remote" to differentiate between your own
server, and the one where the news come from.
To post locally generated news, there are really two options:
Have newsx as a daemon, and make the local INN feed locally
generated news to newsx whenever it desires, and make newsx
buffer it for later transfer.
Let the local INN buffer outgoing news, like it does now. The
problem is how to trigger the local INN to send this via the NNTP
channel. I know of no such way.
> Why not get newsx to access the local newsserver, and fetch all articles
> from it that newsx hasn't already got (I presume this is what it does
> with the remote news server)?
This would look like a third option. The trouble is that this would cause
newsx to pick all unseen articles on the local server and examine the
path of each one to see if the remote server has seen it before. Then
offer any unseen articles to the remote server. This would duplicate the
mechanism built into INN for controlling outgoing feeds, and would cause
very much traffic to be generated on the local server against newsx port.
At best, this would be a very inefficient approach.
> Could it not default to asking the local newsserver, the first time it
> connects, for a list of its newsgroups, and using that?
Yes, but it would have to do that each time it connects, because there
might be new groups. It could use the "newgroups" command to make that
reasonably efficient, I suppose.
But more importantly, it is far from certain that you would want all those
newsgroups exchanged with a given remote server. You could assume that in
most cases, it would be reasonable to exchange groups that are present on
both servers. But consider, for instance, that newsx is used for a small
supplementary feed for a few newsgroups acme.* against the remote server
news.acme.net. Suppose the local server carries 10,000 groups, newsx
would, without access to the newsfeeds file, have to probe all those
10,000 groups against the remote server to find out which groups it should
carry. It would of course maintain a local cache so that it only has to do
this once, but this would nevertheless be highly impractical!
Egil
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Mail: Egil Kvaleberg, Husebybakken 14A, 0379 Oslo, Norway
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