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From: r...@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,news.admin,comp.org.usenix
Subject: Seeking beta-testers for a new NNTP transfer system
Message-ID: <3632@litchi.bbn.com>
Date: 18 Jun 91 15:47:21 GMT
Followup-To: poster
Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc.
Lines: 72
InterNetNews, or INN, is a news transport system. The core part of the
package is a single long-running daemon that handles all incoming NNTP
connections. It files the articles and arranges for them to be forwarded
to downstream sites. Because it is long-running, it can be directed to
spawn other long-running processes, telling them exactly when an article
should be sent to a feed. This can replace the "watch the logfile" mode
of nntplink, for example, with a much cleaner mechanism: read the
batchfile on standard input.
InterNetNews assumes that memory is cheap and fast while disks are slow.
No temporary files are used while incoming articles are being received,
and once processed the entire article is written out using a single
writev(2) call (this includes updating the Path and Xref headers). The
active file is kept in memory (a compile-time option can be set to use
mmap(2)), and the newsfeeds file is parsed once to build a complete matrix
of which sites receive which newsgroups.
InterNetNews uses many features of standard BSD sockets including
non-blocking I/O and Unix-domain stream and datagram sockets. It is
highly doubtful that the official version will ever provide support for
TLI, DECNET, or other facilities.
INN is fast. Not many hard numbers are available (that is one requirement
of being a beta-site), but some preliminary tests show it to be at least
twice as fast as the current standard NNTP/C News combination. For
example, Jim Thompson at Sun has had 20 nntpxmits feeding into a 4/490,
and was getting over 14 articles per second, with the CPU 11% utilized. I
was getting 10 articles/second feeding into a DECstations 3100, with the
program (running profiled!) 50% idle and the load average under .7. (It
is a scary thing to see several articles filed with the same timestamp.)
The sys file format is somewhat different, and has been renamed. The
arcane "foo.all" syntax is gone, replaced with a set of order-dependant
shell patterns. For example, instead of "comp,comp.sys.sun,!comp.sys" you
would write "comp.*,!comp.sys.*,comp.sys.sun"; to not get any groups
related to binaries or pictures, you write "!*pictures*,!*binaries*".
There are other incompatibilities as well. For example, ihave/sendme
control messages are not supported. Also the philosophy is that that
invalid articles are dropped, rather than filed into "junk." (A log
message is written with the reason, and also sent back to the upstream
feed as part of the NNTP reject reply.) The active file is taken to be
the definitive list of groups that an article wants to recieve, and if
none of an article's newsgroups are mentioned in the active file, then the
article is invalid, logged, and dropped.
The history and log files are intended to be compatible with those created
by C News. I want to thank Henry and Geoff for their kind permission to
use DBZ and SUBST. You will need to be running C News expire or a B2.11
expire that has been modified to use DBZ.
The InterNetNews daemon does not implement all NNTP commands. If sites
within your campus are going to post or read news via NNTP, you will need
the standard NNTP distribution. The daemon will spawn the standard nntpd
if any site not mentioned in its "hosts.nntp" file connects to the TCP
port. InterNetNews includes a replacement for the "mini-inews" that comes
with the standard NNTP distribution. This can be used on any machine that
posts news and connects to an NNTP server somewhere; its use is not
limited to INN. At some point I hope to have a replacement nntpd
optimized for newsreaders, and an NNTP transmission program. These will
remove the need for any external software beyond the C News expire program.
If you would like to beta-test this version, please FTP the file
pub/usenet/INN.BETA from cronus.bbn.com for directions. It will be a
fairly tightly-screened beta: DO NOT ASK ME FOR COPIES! Once the system
is stable, it will be freely redistributable. I hope to have the official
release by August 7, so that schools can bring the system up before the
semester starts.
/rich $alz
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