posted to news.software.nntp

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

I just sent a post to news.software.nntp asking about our
various options for lightweight nntp servers. I also mailed a couple
of likely people personally, in case they have any insights. Article
follows:

Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Lightweight news server for Linux News Project?
Organization: Simple End-User Linux Project (www.seul.org)

I'm working on the Linux News Project, and I'm hoping to get advice on
lightweight, robust, and simple nntp servers. Our project's goal is to
create a more structured environment for reading and submitting Linux
news (such as information about new software releases, or articles
about Linux advocacy), through standardization of news storage/sharing
format and a fast robust mechanism for sharing news between
participating sites. So far, Freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net),
Threepoint (http://threepoint.com), Linux Weekly News (http://lwn.net),
and several smaller news services are very interested in participating
if we can get it to work well, and they're interested in putting some
time into designing it as well.

I have decided that an NNTP-based mechanism to keep news synchronized
between the servers is the way to go. However, most news servers I've
looked at are either too bulky and intensive (eg INN, C News) or too
specific or fragile (eg Leafnode). What we want is a simple NNTP-based
transfer method (such as the Net::NNTP perl module) combined with a simple
server that spools, expires, maintains several distinct newsgroups (perhaps
several dozen), supports pgp authentication, and figures out which news
items should be sent to which other servers and does it. Ideally, it
would also have hooks to call scripts when new news arrives. It doesn't
need to be very configurable, but it needs to be lightweight and secure.
In our case, it won't be connected at all to the rest of Usenet.

I feel certain that something like this has already been created, or at 
the least is currently being worked on. I would very much prefer to use
existing software on this, since it will have an author and a user base
who has presumably tested much of it already. Our website is at
http://linuxunited.org/projects/news/ where you'll find a lot more
information about our plans and discussions. Please let me know if you can
help out in any way.

Thanks,
--Roger (arma@mit.edu)