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InterNetNews...[Salz92]: Future work


RFC 977 follows the SMTP protocol for sending text: line are terminated with \r\n, a period is placed before all lines starting with a period, and data is terminated with a line consisting of a single period [Postel82]. Innd must scan the text of all articles it receives and convert them to standard UNIX format. On the transmission side, innxmit must read the articles a line at a time in order to add the extra data. If all newsreading is done via NNTP, then articles could be stored directly in NNTP format, and innxmit could read and write the article in two system calls. The innd gains would not be as dramatic, but tests show it would still be somewhat measurable.

There is no NNTP ``TURN'' command, so that a single connection cannot be used for bidirectional article transfer. Turn -around is very successful on UUCP over conventional phone lines, but seems of limited use on higher -performance network links. The SMTP protocol has had a ``TURN'' command since its inception, but it has received no practical use. Several people find the idea of adding outgoing transfer to innd attractive, since it is already structured for multi -host I/O and the idea of caching recent articles in memory has its appeal. Adding outgoing transfer to innd would take a moderate effort.

InterNetNews(Salz) [Source:"InterNetNews: Usenet transport for Internet sites"] [Copyright: 1992 Rich Salz]
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This is from the Mib Software Usenet RKT

It took a while, but the Internet Software Consortium is guiding the development of innfeed, which sends in-memory copies of articles to multiple sites at once. (With current Usenet volume, innd is quite busy, and could not accomodate additional work as suggested above.) There are some "news routers" which are special purpose "transport only" agents. See the news utilities "outgoing" page

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