comshaft strikes again

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Dan Ritter <dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

>> So who wants to run a (text only) NNTP server off of their cable modem?  :-)
>
> I do, and so do many other people. It's more convenient to
> gather a few feeds and keep the spool around than to connect to
> a remote news-server and try to get articles in realtime.
>
> leafnode is your friend.

Hmm, how does one find people willing to provide USENET feeds (as
oppossed to access) for individuals?
I had heard of leafnode, but didn't see where to get a feed.

>
>> Actually, I wonder if anybody has ever tried to do a distributed NNTP
>> service.  Maybe something like
>> bittorrent?
>
> NNTP is distributed, except at the reader <-> server end. Each
> server keeps a spool of messages, along with an index of what
> they have seen. They talk to all the other servers for which
> connections have been arranged, and exchange all the unseen
> articles in newsgroups to which they mutually subscribe.

My comment about bittorrent was intended (poorly) to suggest that some
kind of distributed hash function (DHF) might allow a USENET
cooperative using spare cycles/bandwidth/disk space to do something
akin to the way that bittorrent makes centralized ftp servers much
less important.  For compatibility with standard clients, a NNTP
gateway to the 'cooperative' would be probably be needed.  Each
node/gateway would cache copies of everything read locally via NNTP
as well as it's share of the general content.  As more people become
interested in a particular newsgroup/article itt gets replicated to
more nodes in the network.
Not sure if you would do DHF by newsgroup name, message-id or what...

Still just random thoughts.  I already have too many blue-sky ideas as it is.

Bill Bogstad