news - nntp server

[Matthew Dixon Cowles]

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 16:00:18 -0000, Nick Trout
<nickatvideosystemdotcodotuk> wrote:

>I'm trying to set up an NNTP/newsgroup server on an NT4 machine.
>
>What is the easiest way to do this please. Can Python help me?!

Nick,
The easiest way to do it depends a good deal on what you want to
do. News is conceptually very simple, it's the volume that's the
problem.

As of just now, a full newsfeed is somewhere in the 10s of GB per
day. Dealing with that requires big pipes, fancy machines, and
software that runs very efficiently.

I tend to doubt that Python can help you much with that. Some of the
links from

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Internet/Servers/Usenet/

may point you at useful software. If you're interested in something
less than a full feed (say, no binaries or no binaries and little of
alt.*) the thing to do would be to talk to your service provider about
how much data that is (and how fast it's growing!) and size your pipe
and hardware accordingly.

That being said, I've been working on a trivial news server in
Python. Actually, it acts as a client, a server, and a cache since
it's intended to allow a newsreader that wants to read news while
online to read it while offline. It's not efficient at all since it's
only intended to deal with the volume of news that one person reads. I
plan to put a link to it at Parnassus

http://www.vex.net/parnassus/

when it's done or at least useful but if you'd like a copy even before
that, mail me and I'll be glad to send it along.

Regards,
Matt