INN
Encyclopedia
InterNetNews is a Usenet
news server
package, originally released by Rich Salz
in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX
conference in San Antonio, Texas
. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP
functionality.
While previous servers processed articles individually or in batches, innd is a single continuously running process that receives articles from the network, files them, and records what remote hosts should receive them. Readers can access articles directly from the disk in the same manner as B News
and C News
, but an included program, called nnrpd, also serves newsreader
s that employ NNTP.
A later improvement was the Cyclical News Filesystem (CNFS), which sequentially stores articles in large on-disk buffers. This method, implemented by Scott Fritchie, greatly increased performance by eliminating the operating system overhead needed to deal with thousands of individual article files.
James Brister's innfeed program was also added to the package. Like innd, innfeed operates continuously to feed articles out to other servers, while the earlier innxmit processed them in batches. This combination allows articles to be received and redistributed with virtually no latency, and has substantially changed the nature of Usenet interaction by reducing the time for messages to be posted, read across the network and answered, from hours or days, to seconds or minutes. A similar earlier program, called nntplink, provided a comparable function, but it was produced independently.
INN is under active development . The package is maintained by volunteers, and development is hosted by the Internet Systems Consortium
.
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
news server
News server
A news server is a set of computer software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. A reader server provides an interface to read and post articles, generally with the assistance of a news client. A transit...
package, originally released by Rich Salz
Rich Salz
Rich Salz is currently the technical lead for the XML appliance products at IBM. He came to IBM when he was Chief Security Officer of DataPower, which was acquired by IBM in 2005....
in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX
USENIX
-External links:* *...
conference in San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States of America and the second-largest city within the state of Texas, with a population of 1.33 million. Located in the American Southwest and the south–central part of Texas, the city serves as the seat of Bexar County. In 2011,...
. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP
Network News Transfer Protocol
The Network News Transfer Protocol is an Internet application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications...
functionality.
While previous servers processed articles individually or in batches, innd is a single continuously running process that receives articles from the network, files them, and records what remote hosts should receive them. Readers can access articles directly from the disk in the same manner as B News
B News
B News was a Usenet news server developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton as a replacement for A News. It was used on Unix systems from 1981 into the 1990s and is the reference implementation for the de facto Usenet standard described in IETF RFC 850 and...
and C News
C News
C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C....
, but an included program, called nnrpd, also serves newsreader
News client
A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet . Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol , to download articles and post new articles...
s that employ NNTP.
A later improvement was the Cyclical News Filesystem (CNFS), which sequentially stores articles in large on-disk buffers. This method, implemented by Scott Fritchie, greatly increased performance by eliminating the operating system overhead needed to deal with thousands of individual article files.
James Brister's innfeed program was also added to the package. Like innd, innfeed operates continuously to feed articles out to other servers, while the earlier innxmit processed them in batches. This combination allows articles to be received and redistributed with virtually no latency, and has substantially changed the nature of Usenet interaction by reducing the time for messages to be posted, read across the network and answered, from hours or days, to seconds or minutes. A similar earlier program, called nntplink, provided a comparable function, but it was produced independently.
INN is under active development . The package is maintained by volunteers, and development is hosted by the Internet Systems Consortium
Internet Systems Consortium
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is a Delaware-registered, 501 public benefit non-profit corporation dedicated to supporting the infrastructure of the universal connected self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production quality software, protocols, and...
.
External links
- Rich Salz (1992). [ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/extra-docs/innusenix.pdf InterNetNews: Usenet transport for Internet sites.]
- Home page for INN