We add conferencing to The BYTE Site, and explore the merits of NNTP, the Usenet's protocol
Jon Udell
Join the Web Project conference
news://dev4.byte.com/joncon
(Usenet view)
http://dev4.byte.com/joncon/threads.html
(Web view)
If you visited The BYTE Site earlier this year, you might have read--and even contributed to--the first draft of this column. How? By joining our "conference on conferencing," an open test of several ways to host threaded discussions on a Web site. Manifestations of electronic conferencing
include Notes discussion databases, CompuServe forums, BIX conferences, and Usenet newsgroups. Because my working life has for a decade revolved around a conferencing system--first Notes, then BIX--I find it difficult to imagine a workplace that isn't conference-enabled. Nevertheless, many are not, so I'll spell out what I mean by the term (see
"What Conferencing Is and Isn't"
).
There are two ways to support this kind of conferencing on your Internet or intranet site. You can do it with a Net News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server of the same sort your company, university, or Internet service provider may already use to connect to the Usenet. That's our focus this month. Or you can do it with a Web server that runs one of a rapidly growing number of purely Web-based conferencing systems. That's next month's topic. A third option will soon emerge as commercial conferencing systems such as Notes and SoftArc's FirstClass develop interfaces to standard Web browsers
.
Usenet-Style Conferencing
For our first experiment I downloaded version 1.4 of the Internet news server (INN) from
ftp://ftp.bsdi.com
, compiled it, and installed it on our BSDI 2.0 server. If that sounds scary, it should. The Internet news server is a big, complicated beast. War stories fill the newsgroups that discuss how to master it (e.g., news.nntp.software). But if your goal is to set up your own conferences, you can skip most of the hard stuff. Maintaining a full inbound Usenet newsfeed is a fairly hard problem. Your server has to suck in up to 10,000 newsgroups' updates every day and delete enough messages to make room for the next batch. So why bother? Newsgroup data has become a commodity nowadays. If you don't supply it locally, your users can always get it from remote sites.
Focus on INN as a stand-alone conferencing system and things get much simpler. Once I got it running, it took just
one command to open our first global conference:
ctlinnd newgroup
bytetalk.conferencing
Two related trends make this venerable Unix command more powerful than it was five or 10 years ago. Thanks to the growth of Internet connectivity, a site-specific conference such as this one can now play to a potential audience of millions. Thanks to the parallel growth of the Usenet, today's newsreaders are more powerful and flexible, so participants in NNTP-based conferences enjoy a richer experience. The Netscape reader, for example, activates URLs found in message texts to create a hyperlinked environment that feels like a Web browser.
How did people discover and join bytetalk.conferencing? I advertised it on our Web site. Netscape users had only to click on the URL
news://dev3.byte.com/bytetalk.conferencing
. That link invokes either Navigator 1.x's browser-based newsreader or
version 2.0's much snazzier
stand-alone reader. Users of other browsers relied on their built-in readers (if available). Or else they used stand-alone readers such as WinVN (
http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/software/winvn/winvn.html
) and Free Agent (
http://www.forteinc.com/forte/agent/index.html
) for Windows, or Nuntius (
http://www.inch.com/aaron/nuntius/nuntius.html
) for the Macintosh. None
of these was as seamless as Navigator 2.0, however.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer doesn't yet honor the
news://dev3.byte.com
syntax; it requires you to configure dev3.byte.com as your default news server.
Likewise Free Agent
and WinVN. If you're already using these with your regular news server, you have to reconfigure them to point at a different one.
Netscape's promiscuity encourages users to hop among news servers just as they hop among Web servers. This unconventional way to exploit NNTP could augur a profound change in the relationship between the Usenet and the Web.
Public and Private NNTP Servers
I've tried both INN 1.4 and a Windows NT version called DNEWS (
http://www.net-shopper.co.uk/
software/dnews/index.htm
). INN runs on an Internet server and hosts both public and private conferences. Here's how to set up one of each:
*:Read,Post:bytetalk:secure:
bytetalk.secure
*:Read,Post:::bytetalk.conferencing
These lines, which I placed in the file nnrpd.access, say: "Allow users from any IP domain (*) who authenticate themselves (user: bytetalk, password: secure) to read and post in bytetalk.secure. And let the whole world use bytetalk.conferencing."
Most visitors to our test conference weren't able to join bytetalk.secure because most were using Netscape Navigator 2.0; unlike Forte's Free Agent and WinVN, it does not support authentication. "Authentication worked in Netscape 1.x, but we broke it in version 2.0," explains Netscape product manager J.F. Sullivan. "It'll be fixed in 2.1."
Since NNTP exchanges credentials as clear text, this casual form of security won't adequately protect confidential discussions conducted on the public Internet. Why u
se it at all, then? It's a tool for social engineering--the NNTP equivalent of an invitation-only list. If you need more robust security, put the NNTP server behind a firewall or (as we're doing with DNEWS) on a LAN that doesn't connect to the Internet.
Alternatively, you can use the Netscape News Server; it wraps Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security, as well as simplified setup and administration, around the core INN. The URL for our conference would then become:
s
news://dev3.byte.com/bytetalk
.
conferencing
You'd need a Netscape browser in order to join this kind of conference. Navigator 2.0's broken authentication wouldn't matter much in this case because you'd be communicating with the news server on a secure port.
Two Forms of Replication
NNTP technology can handle both necessary forms of replication: server-to-server and server-to-client. You can use server-to-server replication to move data nearer to
its users. We probably wouldn't because none of our satellite offices has more than a handful of employees. But if your company has several large divisions, you'd probably want to set up local pools of conference data on a server at each division.
Server-to-client replication matters more to us because BYTE editors often need to work on airplanes or in other places that lack network connections. Forte's excellent Free Agent handles off-line reading and posting nicely. Mark the messages you want to save and it'll stash them on your local disk. Read and reply off-line, then resynchronize the next time you connect.
Neither of these forms of replication challenges the sophistication of Lotus Notes. But as with Web technology, the great strength of Usenet technology is its universality. NNTP-based tools are inexpensive or freely available, they're lightweight, and they run on a global network in both public and private modes. Unlike HTTP, NNTP hasn't yet grown modern extensions. But that could chang
e dramatically this year.
The Future of NNTP
I can't say that bytetalk.conferencing was an unqualified success. Usenet technologies are still diamonds in the rough. NNTP isn't stateless like HTTP, and communication suffers when connections are poor. It doesn't cross firewalls as easily as HTTP. No one newsreader has all the desirable features--rich hypertextual presentation, off-line replication, easy access to multiple servers, authentication. Servers lack tools for pruning and reorganizing discussions.
Despite all these disadvantages, though, bytetalk.conferencing became a useful and widely read ad hoc discussion involving participants all over the world. Note that this conference relied on no commercial software. Many businesses refuse, for valid reasons, to base infrastructure on crusty old Unix shareware. But let's separate implementations from protocols. It's the protocols that really matter. HTTP, SMTP, and NNTP all evolved on a global network and are therefore proven sc
alable.
Consider mail. Does the notoriously complex sendmail utility scare you? It should. But for $495 you can buy Software.com's outstanding SMTP/POP3 server. It runs on Unix and on Windows NT; it's as easy to use as any LAN-based E-mail package; it's a supported product; and it connects you to a planetary communication system.
In the same vein, I expect we'll soon see commercial reimplementations of NNTP servers and clients. Will these usher in a new era of Usenet-style conferencing and spur NNTP innovation? It could happen. Alternatively, Web-based conferencing systems could prevail. We'll explore some of these next month.
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screen_link (68 Kbytes)
Netscape 2.0's newsreader flexibly accommodates multiple news servers and activates URLs in message texts. Unfortunately, it doesn't do authentication or off-line replication.
screen_link (65 Kbytes)
Free Agent lacks Navigator's promiscuity and hypertextual richness. However, it does authenticate against private news servers, and it can replicate conference data to your laptop for off-line reading and posting.
Jon Udell (
judell@bix.com
) is BYTE's executive editor for new media.
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