# NewsCache --- The free cache server for USENET News. # Copyright (C) 1996-1998 Thomas Gschwind # Copyright (C) 2001,2002 Herbert Straub # # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software # Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. # ---------------------------------------------------------------- NewsCache NewsCache is a free cache server for USENET News. NewsCache acts to news reading clients like a news server, except that it stores only those articles that have been requested by at least one client. NewsCache targets problems of the current News System like network bandwidth consumption or the IO load caused by news clients. If NewsCache is used in addition to a news server, it reduces the client load of the news server. By connecting the clients to NewsCache instead of to the news server, multiple requests to the same data will be requested only once from the news server. In a small test at our university, we got a hit rate of over 30%, although the interests of the people accessing NewsCache was relatively wide spread. NewsCache can also replace leaf node news servers, if not all of the articles are permanently accessed by news clients. NewsCache only stores those newsgroups and articles being accessed frequently, while still providing a virtual full feed. This reduces the network bandwidth between the former news server and the news feed. Additionally, it reduces the requirements for disk space and CPU performance. Less CPU performance is sufficient because no local article numbering has to be performed and a smaller database has to be searched. Installation See INSTALL for details. The Library Socket++ 1.2 is required by NewsCache. You can install Socket++ as shared or static library. Please see: http://www.linuxhacker.at/socketxx After successful installation, you have to create your configuration file ${prefix}/etc/newscache.conf. A sample configuration file is copied to ${prefix}/etc/newscache.conf-dist. A SysV init script for RedHat is located in etc/NewsCache.init. Please tell me if you need a different one for another distribution/system. Features Besides caching USENET News, NewsCache provides the following additional features. * Multiplexing between different news servers giving your users the impression of a single news server holding all those newsgroups. * Provision of local newsgroups. This is implemented via the multiplexing functionality. Setup your local news server and let NewsCache multiplex between the local and your default news server. * Offline News Reading. Whenever you connect to your internet provider all your spooled postings will be sent off to your news server and all the groups you wish to read will be transferred to your local cache * Support to switch only selected hosts into offline mode. Articles from those hosts will be fetched via the updatenews program. This can be useful, if you want to read news from a news server with a bad link and do not want to wait until the active database is retrieved. * Access control. This feature requires that libwrap is installed. This is the case on most Linux Systems. For a detailed explanation see man hosts_access. Use NewsCache for the daemon list. Documentation Documentation for the NewsCache and updatenews commands can be found in the doc directory. Manual pages can be found below man. They will also be installed in the location specified to configure. There will be also a tutorial available from the NewsCache homepage, which is available at http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/NewsCache/. Bugs If you encounter a bug in NewsCache, please send a bug report to newscache@linuxhacker.org. Especially in the case, when a news reader does not cooperate with NewsCache. Comments and patches are also accepted. ;) Other Useful Comments If you use NewsCache in offline mode, you might want to grab the newsgroups you wish to read from a place with better and cheaper internet connectivity. Latest Release The latest release is always available from http://www.linuxhacker.at/NewsCache