Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 14 Jun 1995 13:33:12 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva)
Cc:        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: news software - which to use ?
Message-ID:  <199506141833.NAA17922@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <9506141614.AA10133@sonic.nmti.com.nmti.com> from "Peter da Silva" at Jun 14, 95 11:14:03 am

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > cnews and nntp are stagnant. INN is _the_ news tool of choice.
> 
> Cnews is the tool of choice if you do much UUCP. INN treats UUCP like a poor
> relation.

That strikes me as an odd statement:  I am using INN in both an
almost-entirely-NNTP environment (spool.mu.edu) and an almost-entirely-UUCP
environment (news.sol.net) and it's actually easier to set up for UUCP than
NNTP (of course I'm thinking in terms of configuring nntplink and such,
otherwise I think it's about an even match in terms of difficulty).

Outbound...?

C-news may win out if you want to do "unusual" stuff like ihave/sendme
exchanges, but for straight feeds, both seem relatively equivalent.
C-news offers a slightly "cleaner" mechanism to specify how batching is to
happen, INN offers a shell script that was much easier for me to understand
and set options within (I had problems with C-news at first).

Inbound...?

INN is certainly not "batch oriented" in the way that C-news is, but is
instead stream oriented.  That is mostly a strength: it can pound C-news 
into the ground in an environment where you may have multiple rnews 
processes all chatting at once, although it places increased demand (VM -
more processes, more activity, more context sw) on the host system.  If you 
only have a single rnews connecting at a time, I know that there will be 
more csw activity under INN, but that doesn't seem horrible at the levels 
we are then discussing (much lower since there's only a single feed).

However, I will be the first to condemn INN for using obscene amounts of
memory and swap.  :-)  It is an excellent performer, but the system has to
be reasonably able to keep up with it.

> > You should use UUCP over TCP/IP to transport your news, and INN locally
> > to process it.
> 
> I use a program called "slurp" to transport news over NNTP, because it gives
> me a local sys file... I don't have to bother my feed about changes to my
> subscription list. And it's receiver-driven so sceduling connections isn't
> a problem.

That works for some folks, true.  As with many things, ultimately what will
work is dependent on the needs of the site...  slurp does place a nice
little load on the remote host, but is great for smaller subset feeds.  I
would never do a full feed that way  ;-)

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199506141833.NAA17922>