The idea of network news was born in 1979 when two graduate students, Tom
Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of using UUCP to connect machines for
information exchange among Unix users. They set up
a small network of three machines in North Carolina.
Initially, traffic was handled by a number of shell scripts (later
rewritten in C), but they were never released to the public. They
were quickly replaced by “A News,” the first public release of news
software.
A News was not designed to handle more than a few articles
per group and day. When the volume continued to grow, it was rewritten
by Mark Horton and Matt Glickman, who called it the “B” release
(a.k.a. B News). The first public release of B News was version 2.1
in 1982. It was expanded continuously, with several new features
added. Its current version is B News 2.11. It is slowly
becoming obsolete; its last official maintainer switched to
INN.
Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer rewrote B News and released it in 1987; this
is release “C,” or C News. Since its release, there
have been a number of patches to C News, the most prominent being the
C News Performance Release. On sites that carry a large number of groups,
the overhead involved in frequently invoking relaynews,
which is responsible for dispatching incoming articles to other hosts, is
significant. The Performance Release adds an option to
relaynews that allows it to run in
daemon mode, through which the program puts
itself in the background. The Performance Release is the C News version
currently included in most Linux releases. We describe C News in detail in
Chapter 21.
All news releases up to C were primarily targeted for UUCP networks,
although they could be used in other environments, as well. Efficient news
transfer over networks like TCP/IP or DECNet required a new scheme. So in
1986, the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) was
introduced. It is based on network connections and specifies a number of
commands to interactively transfer and retrieve articles.
There are a number of NNTP-based applications available from the Net. One of
them is the nntpd package by Brian Barber and Phil Lapsley,
which you can use to provide newsreading service to a number of hosts inside a
local network. nntpd was designed to complement news
packages, such as B News or C News, to give them NNTP features. If you want
to use NNTP with the C News server, you should read
Chapter 22, which explains how to configure the
nntpd daemon and run it with C News.
An alternative package supporting NNTP is INN, or
Internet News. It is not just a frontend, but a news
system in its own right. It comprises a sophisticated news relay daemon that
can maintain several concurrent NNTP links efficiently, and is therefore the
news server of choice for many Internet sites. We discuss it in detail in
Chapter 23.
