NETNEWS MEMO October 1992 Netnews (Usenet) Introduction - NETNEWS, or USENET as it is more commonly called, is a collection of "newsgroups" distributed electronically around the world. Netnews provides a means for local users to communicate with each other, and with other users nationally and internationally. Usenet was developed for Unix systems in 1979 by two graduate students at Duke University. Within a year, fifty Unix sites, including Bell Labs, were participating. Now, there are thousands of sites running a number of operating systems on a variety of hardware platforms communicating via Usenet around the globe. Site administrators control their own sites. No one has any real control over any site but his own. Sites are not entirely without influence on their neighbors, however. There is a vague notion of "upstream" and "downstream" related to the direction of high-volume news flow. To the extent that "upstream" sites decide what traffic they will carry for their "downstream" neighbors, those "upstream" sites have some influence on their neighbors' participation in Usenet. There are many misconceptions about Usenet. Despite the myths: Usenet is not an organization. Usenet is not a democracy. There is no person or group in charge of Usenet as a whole. Usenet is not an academic network. Although many Usenet sites are universities, research labs or other academic institutions, by plain count, most Usenet sites are commercial entities. Usenet is not the Internet. The Internet is only one of the various networks carrying Usenet traffic. For example, EARN carries Usenet traffic too. Usenet is not a UUCP network. UUCP is a protocol for sending data over point-to-point connections, typically using dialup modems. Sites use UUCP to carry many kinds of traffic, of which Usenet is only one. Usenet is not a UNIX network. Usenet can be found on many operating systems. Usenet is not software. There are dozens of software packages used at various sites to transport and read Usenet articles. So no one program or package can be called "the Usenet software." The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) (as specified in RFC 977) allows hosts to exchange articles via TCP/IP connections rather than using the traditional uucp. It also permits users to read and post news (using a modified version of "rn" or other user agents) from machines which cannot or choose not to install the USENET news software. Reading and posting are done using TCP/IP messages to a server host which does run the USENET software. Sites which have many workstations like the Sun and Apollo products find this a convenient way to allow workstation users to read news without having to store articles on each system. Many of the Usenet hosts that are also on the Internet exchange news articles using NNTP because the load impact of NNTP is relatively low and NNTP ensures fast propagation. Availability - Usenet newsgroups can be read at thousands of sites around the world. In addition, there are several sites that provide public dial-up service, so that people who are not at a Usenet site can have access to newsgroups as well. Availability of service software - There are many software packages available for reading and distributing Netnews on a variety of platforms. The following, excerpted mostly from the article USENET Software: History and Sources, by Gene Spafford, is not an exhaustive list: Unix: Several popular screen-oriented news reading interfaces have been developed in the last few years to replace the traditional "readnews" interface. The first of these was "vnews" and it was written by Kenneth Almquist. "vnews" provides a "readnews"-like command interface, but displays articles using direct screen positioning. It appears to have been inspired, to some extent, by the "notes" system (described below). "vnews" is currently distributed with the standard 2.11 news source. A second, more versatile interface, "rn", was developed by Larry Wall (the author of Perl) and released in 1984. This interface also uses full-screen display with direct positioning, but it includes many other useful features and is very popular with many regular net readers. The interface includes reading, discarding, and/or processing of articles based on user-definable patterns, and the ability of the user to develop customized macros for display and keyboard interaction. "rn" is currently at release 4.4. It is being maintained by Stan Barber of the Baylor College of Medicine. "rn" is not provided with the standard news software release, but is very widely available because of its popularity. The software can be obtained from its official archive site, lib.tmc.edu, using FTP, and via mail from archive-server@bcm.tmc.edu A variant of "rn" is "trn" by Wayne Davison. Trn adds the ability to follow "threads of discussions" in newsgroups; its latest version 2.2 is based on rn 4.4. It uses a Reference-line database to allow the user to take advantage of the "discussion tree" formed by an article and its replies. This results in a true reply-ordered reading of the articles, complete with a small ascii representation of the current article's position in the discussion tree. Trn can be obtained from ftp.coe.montana.edu in the /pub/trn directory, from uunet in the news subdirectory, and from many other archive servers world-wide. There are two popular macro packages named "GNUS" and "Gnews" that can be used with the GNU Emacs text editor. These allow reading, replying, and posting interaction with the news from inside the Emacs text editor. Client code exists to get the articles using NNTP rather than from a local disk. Copies can be found on most archive sites that carry the GNU archives. "nn" is yet another reader interface, developed by Kim F. Storm of Texas Instruments A/S, Denmark, and released in 1989. nn differs from the traditional readnews and vnews by presenting a menu of article subject and sender-name lines, allowing you to preselect articles to read. nn is also a very fast newsreader, as it keeps a database of article headers on-line. (I.e. it trades space for time. A good rule of thumb is that the nn database size is 5%-10% of your news spool. So up to 110% of your news spool is the amount of space news and the nn database will take.) The current version of nn is 6.4.16. nn can be obtained via anonymous FTP from dkuug.dk, uop.uop.edu, or various other sites. Yet another newsreader is the "tin" reader. It operates with threads, has different article organization methods, and is full-screen oriented. tin works on a local news spool or over an NNTP connection. It has been posted to alt.sources, and further information is available from Iain Lea (iain%anl433.uucp@Germany.EU.net). The current release of tin is 1.1 PL5. Tin is based more on the Notes and tass systems than "rn". There is an extensive list of features, including interfaces to batch modes and auto unpacking mechanisms. X-windows: xrn is an X11-based interface to NNTP that was written by Rick Spickelmier and Ellen Sentovich (UC Berkeley). The current version is 6.17. xrn supports many features, including sorting by subject, user-settable key bindings, graceful handling of NNTP server crashes, and many of the features of rn (including KILL files and key bindings similar to rn). xrn is actively supported by the authors with bug fixing and feature addition support from many of the users. xrn can be retrieved from most of the popular FTP sites (gatekeeper.dec.com, ftp.uu.net, export.lcs.mit.edu). Another X11-based newsreader is xvnews. This is a news reader designed primarily for Sun workstations running OpenWindows. It runs with NNTP and is compatible with rn style commands. It is available from export.lcs.mit.edu in the contrib directory. VMS: ANU-NEWS is a news package written by Geoff Huston of Australia for VMS systems. ANU-NEWS is complete news system that allows reading, posting, direct replies, moderated newsgroups, etc. in a fashion closely related to regular news. The implementation includes the RFC 1036 news propagation algorithms and integrated use of the NNTP protocols (see below) to support remote news servers, implemented as a VAX/VMS Decnet object. An RFC 977 server implemented as a Decnet object is also included. The ANU-NEWS interface is similar to standard DEC screen oriented systems. The license for the software is free, and there are no restrictions on the re-distribution. For more info, contact gih900@fac.anu.oz.au (Geoff Huston). ANU-NEWS is available for FTP from kuhub.cc.ukans.edu. Contact SLOANE@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU for more info. A screen-oriented NEWS client for VMS is also available via ftp from ftpvms.ira.uka.de (contact Bernd Onasch for details). Reader NNTP clients for VMS are also available, including VMS/VNEWS (current release 1.4) and an upcoming reader only version of ANU-NEWS. VMS/VNEWS is available via anonymous ftp from arizona.edu (contact jms@arizona.edu for more information) or at any site which archives vmsnet.source. Although the current release of ANU-NEWS is usable as a reader it can be difficult when used with a UNIX server. VM/CMS: There is an IBM VM/CMS version of the Usenet software which is widely available. It is known as PSU NetNews, and it is maintained by Linda Littleton (lrl@psuvm.bitnet/psuvm.psu.edu). Version 2.4 of the software is available from LISTSERV@PSUVM. PSU NetNews supports only 3270 terminals, and uses XEDIT as its screen driver. Most major VM sites appear to use this package. NetNews supports locally-stored news, not NNTP reading. There is NNTP support for PSU NetNews for bulk news receipt: NNTPXFER will poll another site for news, and NNTPRCVR will receive news sent from a Unix NNTPXMIT process. Either program sends the news articles to NetNews for processing. Contact Andy Hooper (hooper@qucdn.bitnet or qucdn.queensu.ca) for more information, or obtain them from listserv@qucdn in PUBLIC FILELIST. These programs are provided with source, and require IBM's FAL TCP/IP and Pascal. An NNTPXMIT sender that works in cooperation with PSU NETNEWS is available from Herman Van Uytven (SYSTHVU@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be). There is at least one NNTP news-reader for VM using XEDIT as its screen manager: NNR. Contact Paul Campbell (pc@mbunix.mitre.org) for information. The program requires IBM's FAL TCP/IP. The software is available for anonymous ftp from rusmv1.rus.uni-stuttgart.de [129.69.1.12] in the directory soft/kommunikation/news/beginner/software/vm-cms/*. MVS: An NNTP news reader is available for TSO/ISPF, called NNMVS. NNMVS is written by Stephen Bacher at Draper Laboratory. It requires C/370 V1R2 (though V1R1 will work) and uses TCP/IP sockets. It is now available via anonymous ftp at ftp.uni-stuttgart.de under the directory /soft/kommunikation/news/beginner/software/nnmvs. The current release is Version 2 Release 3 Modification Level 1 (in pseudo-IBM parlance). Macintosh: An NNTP newsreader for Macintoshs is available called HyperNews. It is implemented as a HyperCard stack and depends on MacTCP. It is available from many Mac archives, including ftp.apple.com and sumex-aim.stanford.edu MSDOS: Trumpet is an NNTP news reader for MSDOS machines by Peter R. Tattam . It requires the use of a packet driver. It provides a user-friendly environment for news-reading and also supports the use of a mouse for point-and-click use. It is available as shareware from tasman.cc.utas.edu.au. Note that the number of software packages available to run news, especially on PCs, is increasing. We have mentioned only a few of the many news packages available, and the presence or absence of any particular software package should not be construed as indicating anything about its suitability usefulness. Other sources of information - News programs communicate with each other according to standard protocols, some of which are described by RFCs. Copies of RFCs are often posted to the net and obtainable from archive sites. Current news-related RFCs include the following: RFC 977 specifies NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol. RFC 1036 specifies the format of Usenet articles. Several articles on USENET are posted periodically to the newsgroup: news.announce.newusers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This document has been compiled and produced by the EARN Association. Permission to copy all or part of this document without fee is granted provided the copies are not used for commercial advantage and that the EARN Association is cited as the source of the document. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This document is available from: LISTSERV@EARNCC.BITNET Send the command: GET filename where the filename is either: NETNEWS PS (Postscript) NETNEWS MEMO (plain text)