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  News Servers: Delivering The News You Want When You Wa nt It Microsoft's news server performed well in our testing, but it wasn't the runaway favorite. Although its scores in interactive performance lagged slightly behind those of INN and Netscape's news server, the product was extremely nimble at servicing incoming connections. According to Microsoft, this is due to its thread-pooling technology, where connection-handling shares a common (and highly optimized) subsystem with IIS. Managing the Microsoft News Server is straightforward. The graphical management utility controls basic news server operation, but not everything is easy to find. For instance, it can import an active file (a list of active newsgroups in the C-News/INN format), but this requires finding the correct arguments to a command-line utility outlined in the re lease documentation. At press time, Microsoft had not finalized details of the news server's availability or packaging. Whether it's sold as an Internet server suite or on its own, the product stands out as the only one offering a solid solution for authenticating users other than creating an independent user database.
NetManage Z-Forum Server 6.0 (Beta)
NetManage's performance was comparable to that of the Microsoft server, however, its support of streaming mode news feeds gave it a distinct advantage over Microsoft. Also included were NNTP extensions to NT's performance monitor, which we found were slightly better than those offered by Microsoft. For comparison, while NetManage offered a line item to display the number of articles downloaded per second, Microsoft only offered the number of NNTP "next" article commands per second (which can be misleading if clients request articles by name, instead of reading articles in sequence). The only feature we missed was the ability to limit the number of concurrent connections. However, this would only be useful when opening the server to an unlimited amount of clients. In our experience, even Internet servers are limited to a particular range of addresses or domains. The other serve rs we tested implement this feature. All in all, we were impressed with NetManage's server. It offered all the features of a strong Internet server. But if you are looking for an intranet solution, you may prefer tighter integration with NT's security service.
Internet Software Consortium InterNetNews 1.5
Configuring INN means wading through a dazzling array of compiler and configuration options. We found INN to be an extremely complex, yet very flexible and responsive news server. Unlike its Windows NT-based brethren, INN must b e configured and compiled for every platform. Although binary versions are available from many sites on the Internet, we don't recommend using precompiled binaries, since many configuration options must be compiled into the server. We found that INN is also a stable, reliable, but nonintuitive application. Unlike the other NT servers, INN must be configured (using a 900+ line configuration file) and compiled before it can be installed. From there, news feeds and access permissions must be configured before the server is up and running.
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From its genesis as a shareware news server called NNS to its rewrite into a commercial product, the NetManage Z-Forum Server has been designed to run on Windows NT from the ground up. Although not specifically directed at the USENET server market, NetManage offers a solid news server for both Internet and intranet applications. It was a close race between Microsoft and NetManage for top honors. The Z-Forum server suffers from its lack of integration with the NT security service, but is otherwise on a par with Microsoft's server in
terms of performance and monitoring tools. In addition, NetManage supports streaming mode NNTP--a plus for Internet servers.
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by Jay Milne Updated Februayr 7, 1997 |
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