pjh@mccc.edu (Peter J. Holsberg) (05/10/91)
As the sysadm for a USENET site that is dial-up UUCP-connected, I'm completely ignorant of NNTP and how it fits into the USENET picture. Could someone point me to something I could read about this? Thanks, Pete -- Prof. Peter J. Holsberg Mercer County Community College Voice: 609-586-4800 Engineering Technology, Computers and Math UUCP:...!princeton!mccc!pjh 1200 Old Trenton Road, Trenton, NJ 08690 Internet: pjh@mccc.edu Trenton Computer Festival -- 4/20-21/91
cliff@cylink.uucp (Clifton Shak) (05/12/91)
I got if from a reliable source that NNTP means "no news to post". :-) Come on, Pete. You deserved it. Boy, if this got out on Compuserve.... NNTP stands for Network News Transfer Protocol. It's purpose is covered in RFC977. The basic idea is that with machines hooked up via high speed networks, there should be no need to ship an entire newsfeed to each machine, wasting disk space and tying up the network. A user on a machine should be able to request just the articles he wants to read from a central news server, interactively. NNTP provides the mechanisms for doing this. Nice idea, especially for clusters of workstations tied to a server. UUNET has NNTP in their networks directory someplace.
molenda@s1.msi.umn.edu (Jason Molenda) (05/12/91)
cliff@cylink.uucp (Clifton Shak) writes: >NNTP stands for Network News Transfer Protocol. It's purpose is covered in >RFC977. The basic idea is that with machines hooked up via high speed >networks, there should be no need to ship an entire newsfeed to each machine, >wasting disk space and tying up the network. A user on a machine should be >able to request just the articles he wants to read from a central news server, >interactively. NNTP provides the mechanisms for doing this. Nice idea, >especially for clusters of workstations tied to a server. A small point: It is also used commonly to transfer news between news server hosts. So it does two functions: it provides a reading interface for news-less hosts (e.g. a cluster of machines all reading from one server on a campus/business/whatever) and it also serves to transfer news between systems over high speed networks. There is occasionally talk of splitting it into two seperate programs, although that would be quite a way in the future if it ever happens. -- Jason Molenda, Tech Support, Iris & News Admin, Minnesota Supercomputer Inst molenda@msi.umn.edu || "You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish."