InterNetNews (INN) is a

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

news server package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX conference in

San Antonio, Texas ("Cradle of Freedom") , image_map = , mapsize = 220px , map_caption = Interactive map of San Antonio , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1= State , subdivision_name1 = Texas , subdivision_t ...

. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP functionality. While previous servers processed articles individually or in batches, ''innd'' is a single continuously running process that receives articles from the network, files them, and records what remote hosts should receive them. Readers can access articles directly from the disk in the same manner as B News and

C News C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C. Functionally, the operati ...

, but an included program, called ''nnrpd'', also serves newsreaders that employ NNTP. A later improvement was the Cyclical News

Filesystem In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

(CNFS), which sequentially stores articles in large on-disk buffers. This method, implemented by Scott Fritchie, greatly increased performance by eliminating the operating system overhead needed to deal with thousands of individual article files. James Brister's ''innfeed'' program was also added to the package. Like ''innd'', ''innfeed'' operates continuously to feed articles out to other servers, while the earlier ''innxmit'' processed them in batches. This combination allows articles to be received and redistributed with virtually no latency, and has substantially changed the nature of Usenet interaction by reducing the time for messages to be posted, read across the network and answered, from hours or days, to seconds or minutes. A similar earlier program, called ''nntplink,'' provided a comparable function, but it was produced independently. INN is under active development . The package is maintained by volunteers, and development is hosted by the

Internet Systems Consortium Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is a Delaware-registered, 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that supports the infrastructure of the universal, self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production-quality so ...

. The current maintainer of INN is Russ Allbery and the ISC.

Notes

References

External links

* Rich Salz (1992)
InterNetNews: Usenet transport for Internet sites.
'
Russ Allbery's INN site

ISC's home page for INN

INN source code
{{DEFAULTSORT:Internetnews Usenet Usenet servers Software using the ISC license