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  News Servers: Delivering The News You Want When You Wa nt It By Dan Backman with Jeremy Impson Imagine an Internet service that connects millions of people daily. From cryptic text interfaces to the latest graphical newsreaders, USENET, a global discussion forum, does just that by offering thousands of newsgroups on virtually any subject. It's a medium that empowers users to ask questions, share answers and opinions and absorb wisdom (or lack thereof) from their peers worldwide.  To view the Report card.
To an Internet citizen, USENET is an invaluable resource, but behind the scenes, it's a specialized service requiring special hardware and software considerations. We put four news servers through their paces at our Syracuse University lab. We evaluated each for its features to support Internet news and private discussion groups for intranet use. In addition to InterNetNews (INN), a news server available on the Internet and maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (www.isc.org), we tested commercial offerings from Netscape Communications Corp. as well as beta releases of news servers from NetManage and Microsoft Corp. All the News That's Fit to Serve Unlike Internet e-mail, which delivers messages directly to the recipient, news postings in USENET are passed among news servers throughout the Internet. Readers access current articles that are cached on a local news server, which also accepts and transfers its posts to other news servers. The backbone of this system is the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP: RFC 977). Alth ough USENET was designed to pass batches of articles through Unix-to-Unix Communication Protocol (UUCP), real-time transfers via NNTP and NNTP-enabled reader software have made USENET a part of today's client/server Internet. Recently, news has taken on an addi tional role. With the growing popularity of standards-based intranet applications, NNTP news servers are providing private discussion groups in addition to USENET groups. By taking advantage of news reading applications on the desktop as opposed to proprietary groupware, private discussion groups can be added with relatively little overhead--and cost. However, this introduces concerns with user authentication and management, which is not well-implemented in many news servers (see "News Servers? I'll Take Intranet Groupware for $1,000," November 15, 1996, page 101). If you plan to authenticate users, make sure the news server ties into an existing user database. Otherwise, you'll find yourself duplicating accounts by hand--or writing a proprietary s ystem to keep them in sync.
Microsoft Corp. Microsoft News Server 1.0 (Beta)
As an Internet server, Microsoft News Server 1.0 offers an impressive array of features, but we were disappointed by its lack of support for streaming-mode NNTP. Although it's not a part of the NNTP spec (RFC 977), it has b ecome a de facto standard among USENET sites throughout the Internet. Microsoft was the only server in this review that did not support it. Streaming mode NNTP speeds news transfers by lessening the lock-step or "ping-pong" protocol that occurs when transmitting articles. It works by breaking up the article ID check and the transmission command, creating a transmission window. During our testing, we found a nearly 200 percent increase in transfer time when not using streaming-mode NNTP. Also, when requesting streaming-mode, Microsoft's News Server responded with a "250" error code, which effectively gives the go ahead but none of the extended commands are supported.
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Microsoft's soon-to-be-released News Server brings a new level of maturity to the world of NNTP servers. As opposed to the cryptic configuration and installation of a Unix-based service like INN, this news server, and its Windows NT cousins, practically administrates itself. More important, it offers a true solution for private discussion groups. The integration with Windows NT security means that authenticating users can be relatively painless as long as users have accounts on an NT server or domain. For this reason, we gave Microsoft a big thumbs-up for use as an intranet server.
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by Jay Milne Updated Februayr 7, 1997 |
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