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What is USENET?
It is a collection of
user-submitted notes or messages on various
subjects that are posted to servers on a
worldwide network. Each subject collection of
posted notes is known as a
newsgroups. There are thousands of
newsgroups and it is possible for you to form a
new one. Most groups are hosted on
Internet-connected servers, but they can also be
hosted from servers that are not part of the
Internet. The original protocol was UNIX-to-UNIX
Copy (UUCP),
but today the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
is used.
Usenet is mostly accessed
via newsgroup readers, such as Outlook Express,
that run as separate programs.
USENET HISTORY
The idea of network (
Usenet ) news was born in 1979 when two graduate
students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of
using UUCP to connect machines for the purpose
of information exchange among 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. Bnews). The first public release of
Bnews was version-2.1 in 1982. It was expanded
continuously, with several new features being
added. Its current version is Bnews-2.11. It is
slowly becoming obsolete, with its last official
maintainer having switched to INN.
Another rewrite was done
and released in 1987 by Geoff Collyer and Henry
Spencer; this is release ``C'', or C-News. In
the time following 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
to run it in daemon mode, in which the
program puts itself in the background.
The Performance Release
is the C-News version currently included in most
releases.
All news releases up to
``C'' are primarily targeted for UUCP networks,
although they may be used in other environments
as well. Efficient news transfer over networks
like TCP/IP, DECNet, or related requires a new
scheme. This was the reason why, 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, among other
things, to provides newsreading service to a
number of hosts inside a local network. nntpd
was designed to complement news packages such as
Bnews or C-News to give them NNTP features.
A different NNTP package
is INN, or Internet News. It is not merely a
front end, but a news system by its own right.
It comprises a sophisticated news relay daemon
that is capable of maintaining several
concurrent NNTP links efficiently, and is
therefore the news server of choice for many
Internet sites.
Today, Usenet connects
tens of thousands of sites around the world,
from mainframes to PC's. With thousands of
newsgroups and untold thousands of readers, it
is perhaps the world's largest computer network.
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