Network News Transfer Protocol
RFC 977
| Document | Type |
RFC - Proposed Standard
(February 1986; No errata)
Obsoleted by RFC 3977
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
| Stream | Legacy | ||
| Formats | plain text pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
| Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
| Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
| RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
| IESG | IESG state | RFC 977 (Proposed Standard) | |
| Telechat date | |||
| Responsible AD | (None) | ||
| Send notices to | (None) | ||
Network Working Group Brian Kantor (U.C. San Diego)
Request for Comments: 977 Phil Lapsley (U.C. Berkeley)
February 1986
Network News Transfer Protocol
A Proposed Standard for the Stream-Based
Transmission of News
Status of This Memo
NNTP specifies a protocol for the distribution, inquiry, retrieval,
and posting of news articles using a reliable stream-based
transmission of news among the ARPA-Internet community. NNTP is
designed so that news articles are stored in a central database
allowing a subscriber to select only those items he wishes to read.
Indexing, cross-referencing, and expiration of aged messages are also
provided. This RFC suggests a proposed protocol for the ARPA-Internet
community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
1. Introduction
For many years, the ARPA-Internet community has supported the
distribution of bulletins, information, and data in a timely fashion
to thousands of participants. We collectively refer to such items of
information as "news". Such news provides for the rapid
dissemination of items of interest such as software bug fixes, new
product reviews, technical tips, and programming pointers, as well as
rapid-fire discussions of matters of concern to the working computer
professional. News is very popular among its readers.
There are popularly two methods of distributing such news: the
Internet method of direct mailing, and the USENET news system.
1.1. Internet Mailing Lists
The Internet community distributes news by the use of mailing lists.
These are lists of subscriber's mailbox addresses and remailing
sublists of all intended recipients. These mailing lists operate by
remailing a copy of the information to be distributed to each
subscriber on the mailing list. Such remailing is inefficient when a
mailing list grows beyond a dozen or so people, since sending a
separate copy to each of the subscribers occupies large quantities of
network bandwidth, CPU resources, and significant amounts of disk
storage at the destination host. There is also a significant problem
in maintenance of the list itself: as subscribers move from one job
to another; as new subscribers join and old ones leave; and as hosts
come in and out of service.
Kantor & Lapsley [Page 1]
RFC 977 February 1986
Network News Transfer Protocol
1.2. The USENET News System
Clearly, a worthwhile reduction of the amount of these resources used
can be achieved if articles are stored in a central database on the
receiving host instead of in each subscriber's mailbox. The USENET
news system provides a method of doing just this. There is a central
repository of the news articles in one place (customarily a spool
directory of some sort), and a set of programs that allow a
subscriber to select those items he wishes to read. Indexing,
cross-referencing, and expiration of aged messages are also provided.
1.3. Central Storage of News
For clusters of hosts connected together by fast local area networks
(such as Ethernet), it makes even more sense to consolidate news
distribution onto one (or a very few) hosts, and to allow access to
these news articles using a server and client model. Subscribers may
then request only the articles they wish to see, without having to
wastefully duplicate the storage of a copy of each item on each host.
1.4. A Central News Server
A way to achieve these economies is to have a central computer system
that can provide news service to the other systems on the local area
network. Such a server would manage the collection of news articles
and index files, with each person who desires to read news bulletins
doing so over the LAN. For a large cluster of computer systems, the
savings in total disk space is clearly worthwhile. Also, this allows
workstations with limited disk storage space to participate in the
news without incoming items consuming oppressive amounts of the
workstation's disk storage.
We have heard rumors of somewhat successful attempts to provide
centralized news service using IBIS and other shared or distributed
file systems. While it is possible that such a distributed file
system implementation might work well with a group of similar
computers running nearly identical operating systems, such a scheme
is not general enough to offer service to a wide range of client
systems, especially when many diverse operating systems may be in use
among a group of clients. There are few (if any) shared or networked
file systems that can offer the generality of service that stream
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