Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Chapter 22. NNTP and the nntpd Daemon

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) provides for a vastly different approach to news exchange from C News and other news servers without native NNTP support. Rather than rely on a batch technology like UUCP to transfer news articles between machines, it allows articles to be exchanged via an interactive network connection. NNTP is not a particular software package, but an Internet standard described in RFC-977. It is based on a stream-oriented connection, usually over TCP, between a client anywhere in the network and a server on a host that keeps Netnews on disk storage. The stream connection allows the client and server to interactively negotiate article transfer with nearly no turnaround delay, thus keeping the number of duplicate articles low. Together with the Internet’s high-transfer rates, this adds up to a news transport that surpasses the original UUCP networks by far. While some years ago it was not uncommon for an article to take two weeks or more before it arrived in the last corner of Usenet; it is now often less than two days. On the Internet itself, it is even within the range of minutes.

Various commands allow clients to retrieve, send, and post articles. The difference between sending and posting is that the latter may involve articles with incomplete header information; it generally means that the user has just written the article.^[132] Article retrieval may be used by news transfer clients as well as newsreaders. This makes ...