Changi NNTP Server 1.2

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Newsserver Functions

The newsserver, news daemon, NNTP server, NNTP daemon, nntpd, or whatever you prefer to call it, is the central part in the game. In the Changi package this part is implemented in an executable named CHANGI.EXE.

Usually this process is started during system boot. It is sitting around and doing nothing until the first client requests a connection.

Newsreader programs are one type of clients. In a very simple view, these newsreaders send posted messages, so called news articles, to the server. The server stores them in his local newsbase and other newsreaders may retrieve these articles later. This simple scheme, plus the ability to run newsservers and news clients on different machines, is all you need to set up discussion groups, where each post is distributed to all readers. In newsserver environments these discussion groups are called newsgroups.

As expected, reality is a bit more complicated. Special clients are needed to exchange news between servers or outdated articles must be removed from the local newsbase. The Changi newsserver doesn't support these functions directly, but offers a large number of functions to be initiated by standard and extended NNTP commands sent by client programs.

Newsreaders also expect more information from a server than just raw articles. Examples are lists of available newsgroups or overview data of a range of articles within a specified newsgroup.

If you think of the large number of newsservers connected to the internet, exchanging news in a flooding routing algorithm, you can imagine, that one of the main tasks of a newsserver is to avoid duplicate transmissions.

Although not the task of a newsserver by definition, a part of the article distribution to other sites is integrated into the Changi newsserver. However, Changi will not send them directly, but stores them in spool files, waiting to be transmitted to the remote server by specialized client.


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URL: changi/manual/whatserv.html
Created: 21 July 1997
Revised: 21 July 1997
Author: harald@os2point.ping.de