Learning Windows Server 2003

Network News Services

The Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) is a staple of the old-style Internet that continues to be useful today. The most popular newsgroup service, USENET, contains tens of thousands of groups dedicated to almost every subject imaginable, including car repair, hunting, computers, child development, travel, and the like. Some corporations have even begun establishing operations involving technical support for their products on private news servers. Microsoft has quite an extensive assisted community thriving on its news server at msnews.microsoft.com.

IIS 6 includes an NNTP server, which you can install to create your own newsgroups for internal or external use. In this section I’ll walk you through installing, configuring, and using your newsgroups.

Creating a Newsgroup Server

IIS automatically installs the newsgroup portion when you install IIS, so a default news server has already been created. But if you need a separate server, perhaps one for testing, the procedure is as follows:

1. Open IIS Manager.

2. Open the Action menu, and from the New menu, select NNTP Virtual Server.

3. The New NNTP Virtual Server Wizard appears. Click Next to skip the introductory text.

4. Enter a friendly name for the new news server that will appear on all administrative pages. Click Next.

5. Select the IP address on which the virtual server will live, and enter the port number on which the server will run. The defaults are all unassigned and 119, respectively.

6. In this step, tell IIS where ...