Article 13314 of alt.sources: A LPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA A L PHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA A L P HA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA AL P H A ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALP H A ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA A NNTPCACHE 0.85UL This is an ALPHA release! It has only been tested with a few combinations of hardware/OS/servers/newsreaders. There are definitely all sorts of combinations of the above out there that nntpcache will fail to work with at all. There is also undoubtably a slew of nasty bugs we have yet to find, even on the tested platforms. Caveat Empor! Theory of operation: NNTPCache executes on the localhost pretending to be an NNRP news reading server. In fact, what it does is pass certain NNTP commands through to real (remote) news-servers based on various pattern matching rules. nntpcache then takes the output from those servers and caches & indexes it in funky ways (much specific case magic goes into this). The next time such information is asked for, or information which can be logically inferred from previously collated information, it is sent directly from the cache, without consulting the remote servers. After nntpcached has run for a few days of even moderate use, it saves IMMENSE amounts of bandwidth (we were quite astounded to see just how much bandwidth news uses. On our network, news steals more network traffic than everything else combined (we kid you not). With nntpcache, startup times for newsreaders becomes limited only by the speed of your internal network (or the loopback device if the readers are run on the same machine as nntpcached - there no reason you can not run several nntpcached's on different machines - indeed with larger sites, this practice is recommended. Even ethernets can become clogged with news traffic). nntpcache can transparently merge local newsgroups & remote feeds (usually handled by inn) with remote NNRPD and nntpcache servers to create mind-bogglingly large "virtual" newsfeeds, without having to negotiate for the actual feeds or allocating anything like bandwidth they would require. Tested on: Linux 1.3.70+ and FreeBSD2.2-current, with the remote servers all running NNRPD (inn) or NNTPCached 0.85UL. But should on most modern unix boxes. (Please send reports or patches) Authors: Julian Assange (proff@suburbia.net) Luke Bowker (puke@suburbia.net) Archive: ftp://ftp.suburbia.net/pub/nntpcache/nntpcache.tgz -- "I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?" - Leo Bulero/PKD +---------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------+ |Julian Assange RSO | PO Box 2031 BARKER | Secret Analytic Guy Union | |proff@suburbia.net | VIC 3122 AUSTRALIA | finger for PGP key hash ID = | |proff@gnu.ai.mit.edu | FAX +61-3-98199066 | 0619737CCC143F6DEA73E27378933690| +---------------------+--------------------+---------------------------------+