Date: Thu, 15 Jun 1995 16:21:57 +0200 (MET DST) From: Andreas Klemm <andreas@knobel.GUN.de> To: jan@bagend.atl.ga.us (Jan Isley) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: news software - which to use ? Message-ID: <199506151421.QAA03300@knobel.GUN.de> In-Reply-To: <m0sLtDw-0006SmC@bagend.atl.ga.us> from "Jan Isley" at Jun 14, 95 10:15:16 am
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> Michael Smith wrote:
>
> > Julian Howard Stacey stands accused of saying:
> > >
> > > Question:
> > > Which manuals should I read for which tools, to get my host to
> > > download a few newsgroups from my IP provider to read off line ?
> > > It seems FreeBSD offers a choice between at least nntp, cnews, & inn.
>
> > cnews and nntp are stagnant. INN is _the_ news tool of choice.
>
> This is totally bogus. C news is *not* stagnant and is *the* choice
> of many thousands of sites. It depends on what the individual site
> needs are. For a low volume site, INN is overkill, an unnecessarily
> large drain on system resources.
Apropos System recources. I don't think, that inn costs more
performance than cnews does...
Cnews is slow compared with inn. When sending news there are several
shell scripts and programs (but mostly shellscripts) called to
postprocess the News articleis.
When receiving News, then the articles are first copied to the
Cnews incoming spool directory and after that processed by another
programm.
There are about 5 or six entries in the crontab file necessary
for a well configured C-news system. You have to fiddle around
with the times, when to execute the tasks and so on.
If a strange error occurres, it's kinda hell to hack through that
many scripts and filter programs...
Compared to that inn is very much better.
First it's designed for throughput.
There is only one daemon programm running, called innd, which acts
as a nntp server. Do you call that one and only daemon program, that
acts as a NNTP Server an "overkill" ?!
Compared to Cnews inn does not the braindamaged copying of incoming
News batches from the UUCP to the News incoming spool directory.
Articles will be stored by rnews directly into the News Spool Directory !
This saves disk space and overall performance !!!
There is only one administration shellscript that runs on a daily
basis, that does News expiration and informs you about the status
of the news system (News Newsgroup, Top ten of bad newsgroups,
disk space in News spool area).
So the News maintenance is very easy and you have only one
crontab entry ! And one for batching News are only 2. Everything
very clear. No fiddeling around necessary.
Since the daemon process innd is a NNTP Server, I can easily
connect to the NNTP Server with Newsreader like tin and such,
who understand NNTP protocoll. Another goody is, that my wife
can read News, too, on her Windows PC using a nntp-able news reader.
So it's an additional advantage, if you have a mini network at home.
No need to setup a seperate NNTP server !
I'd recommend everybody inn, even on smaller machines (6-8 MB).
Look here ... normally only one program sleeps in the background,
if there is no traffic:
PID TT S TIME SIZE RSS %CPU %MEM COMMAND
266 ? S 0:51 3076 636 0.0 2.1 /opt/NEWS/inn-1.4-sec2/etc/innd -p4
When reading News with rtin, you get the following additional
processes:
3181 pts/5 S 0:06 2732 2216 0.0 7.1 /opt/NEWS/bin/rtin
3184 ? S 0:04 1724 1268 0.0 4.1 /opt/NEWS/inn-1.4-sec2/etc/in.nnrpd
If you don't like a NNTP based Newsreaders, then you can run
the normal ones, that read from a local spool directory. Then
you only have the innd process running. You can additionally save
space, I think, if you compile inn without the MMAP option.
I have a large memory mapped active file... So innd uses up 3 MB
of memory.
Ok, hope you enjoyed it ;-))
Andreas ///
--
andreas@knobel.gun.de /\/\___ Wiechers & Partner Datentechnik GmbH
Andreas Klemm ___/\/\/ - Support Unix - akl@wup.de -
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