NNTP News Server Features

Web Crossing NNTP News Server - Introduction
NNTP concepts
Push vs Pull
Port Number
Setting Up
Master Switch
Setting a Folder for Newsreader Access
Troubleshooting
Resources

Introduction

The Web Crossing server can act as a full-featured NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) News Server. Each folder can be set independently to receive from and send to other NNTP news servers. The uses for this are many and include:

• Participating in the tens of thousands of public Internet newsgroups around the world - allowing your members to participate directly via Web Crossing.
• Creating your own local newsgroups and sharing them with other NNTP servers.
• Gating with non-Web Crossing conferences, which support the NNTP protocol. This feature can also be used to convert a conference database from another conferencing system to Web Crossing.

Note: Web Crossing adheres to standard Internet headers and protocols, but not all NNTP systems do. For example, the FirstClass Intranet Server (FCIS) made by SoftArc has a simple NNTP gateway feature, but does not adhere to standard Internet headers when making NNTP transfers. In order to aid people who want to upgrade their FirstClass systems to Web Crossing, Web Crossing has added special features to Web Crossing's NNTP system that recognize the nonstandard features of FirstClass so that FirstClass conferences can be transferred to Web Crossing, maintaining proper message threading.




Note: For licensure purposes, email and newsgroup messages count as 10/100ths of a page view each. For more information on licensing, see the licensing section.

Figure 1 - NNTP News Server Features

Before setting your NNTP server settings, there are a few concepts that should be understood.

Push vs. Pull

When receiving messages from another NNTP server, there are two methods that can be used. You can either rely on the other server to "push" new messages to you according to rules set by the other server, or you can "pull" new messages in from the other server yourself.

What are the advantages of one method over another? The traditional way of receiving Internet newsgroups has been to allow the other side to push messages to the receiving server. Many NNTP servers only allow this method, so you may have no choice. You should ask the newsgroup administrator of the providing server if your Web Crossing NNTP server must be set to allow pushed messages to be received. Push is inconvenient, however, for two reasons:

1. In order to change the schedule, you must contact the pushing server administrator and request a change.
2. In order to add to or subtract from the list of newsgroups being transferred you must also make a request to the pushing server administrator.

The pull method means that your Web Crossing NNTP server goes and gets new messages itself, without waiting for any action from the other side. Sometimes this method is called "Client-side protocol" because this is the method used by newsreader programs to access newsgroups and Web Crossing acts like a newsreader program when it uses pull. Generally pull is easier to set up because you can freely add and remove newsgroups. However the NNTP server you are connecting to may only support push transfers. Check with the NNTP administrator you wish to transfer messages with to be sure.

Likewise, when sending message to another NNTP server you can choose to push them or wait and have the other server pull them from your site. Again, you may have no choice in which method you choose. The other server may require you to push messages. It is very common for NNTP servers to have no pull feature, and thus they may depend on your site pushing messages to them.

If you are creating a gateway server to provide messages for many different Web Crossing servers it is convenient to let the other servers pull messages from you and push messages to you. That way all you have to do is set the correct permissions settings on your site and leave the actual accessing up to other servers.

Port Number

All TCP/IP services, such as web serving, mail, telnet, FTP and news, access servers at a particular port number. The port number is what is used to distinguish one TCP/IP service from another. The most commonly used port number for web users is Port 80, which is the default port number used for web browser access.

The default NNTP service port number is 119. You should make sure that your NNTP port number matches that of the other NNTP servers you are connecting to.

Setting up Web Crossing for NNTP serving

This is done in two parts:

1. Set the master switch to turn on news services and set the IP address and port number for the service.
2. Set each folder's newsgroup setting.

The Master Switch

The master switch to turn on news services is located in Control Panel > News service (NNTP).

1. First check the item Provide news service (NNTP) from Web Crossing. This is the master on-off setting for all news services for Web Crossing. If this box is not checked, you will not be able to set news service settings in your conference folders.
2. Next, you must set the IP address and Port Number for news services in the TCP/IP Port for news service box. The format for this is nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn:nn (a dotted IP address, a colon and a port number). For example, Web Crossing Harbor has an IP address of 210.226.166.204 and we are using the standard NNTP Port Number of 119, so we have entered 210.226.166.204:119 in this box.

In most cases you can leave the remaining settings at their default values. The remaining values are mostly self-explanatory:

• Maximum number of simultaneous connections: If you have limited bandwidth, it is best not to increase this number to a large value or it will result in slow serving to users.
• Inactive timeout (minutes) for NNTP connections:
• Use 8bit encoding for messages: If you are using certain European languages with extended characters you may find it useful to check this box. If you are using a Japanese system, you should not check this box.
• Allow attachments to be posted (come in) through NNTP
• Allow attachments to be sent (go out) through NNTP
• Maximum size of incoming posts, including attachments:

The rest of the settings in this panel are the default news server settings.

To set Web Crossing to mirror newsgroups, you must check the box labeled Enable newsgroup (NNTP) mirroring (master switch). This checkbox turns on and off NNTP news server features.

Next you can set default settings for outgoing NNTP messages. Each folder can override these settings on a folder-by-folder basis. So you can leave this setting blank if you want to only use custom settings for each folder. But it is often convenient to set a default here, particularly if you want to use the same settings for many different folders.

Figure 2 - NNTP News Server Settings - outgoing messages default settings

In figure 2, there are three settings:

1. Send new messages to: Enter the remote server IP address and port number. The default port number is 119. If you are not specifying a port number you can also enter the remote NNTP news server full domain name, such as news.yourprovider.com.
2. The Username field is only required if a login is required by your remote server. In many cases this is not required and may be left blank. (Usually your provider will already have restricted access to their server by registering your server's IP address. In that case, a separate login is not required.)
3. The Password field is only required if the Username is required.

Figure 3. NNTP News Server Settings - incoming messages default settings

The incoming messages settings are similar to the outgoing settings. The differences are:

1. You must set whether or not you are pulling messages from a remote server or whether you are permitting the remote server to push messages to your site.

2. If you are allowing push, you can specify more than one server. This allows you to receive messages from more than one news server. (If you set "pull" as your default method then it does not make sense to enter more than one IP address here.)