sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber) (11/26/90)
In article <14@grumbly.UUCP> duc@grumbly.UUCP (Richard Ducoty) writes: >The reason rn is the 'most popular' is that it's packed along with the >news much of the time. People, being the cheap, lazy creatures, >don't always expend the extra effort to get a decent reader. vnews and readnews are part of BNEWS. CNEWS has its varients. rn 4.3 came with BSD 4.3, and a patch kit to make it work with nntp was packaged with nntp for awhile. However, rn was not and is not part of the news distibution, per se. Go read the document on the news software. It is posted monthly to news.announce.newusers. The biggest problem with nn and trn is the fact that they (currently) have incompatible thread databases. In fact, it would be a pretty neat idea to build some kind of standard interface for doing this kind of thing so that it could be ported to more news readers or architecture other than Unix! We might be able to move some of this proposed standard interface back into NNTP. However, Unix NNTP has enough problems trying to cope with the differences in the two BACK-end (CNEWS and BNEWS) to be mutilated into supporting two different threading architectures. -- Stan internet: sob@bcm.tmc.edu Director, Networking Olan uucp: {rutgers,mailrus}!bcm!sob and Systems Support Barber Opinions expressed are only mine. Baylor College of Medicine
huntting@crimson.csn.org (Brad Huntting) (11/27/90)
larry@nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) writes: |scoob@vlsi.polymtl.ca (Christian Marcotte) writes: |> News reading is now REALLY EFFICIENT thanks to TRN !!! |what does trn offer over nn? We've been running nn now for almost |a year - without any problems -- I have no experience with trn, but we have one machine on campus which uses nn. It consistently consumes more resources (by number of articles requested, cpu time, connect time, you name it) than any other machine on campus. The number of readers on this machine is only a fraction of the next runner up though. I assume that this is because nn reads ALL article headers off the server regardless of wheather someone want's them. Is anyone working on a better nntp-nn interface? For that matter just a better caching stratagy would be nice... Does nn use XHDR to grab groups of headers deemed importaint? Could it be set up to cache only locally read newsgroups? Perhaps only asking for the headers when someone read's them? brad