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# NewsCache --- The free cache server for USENET News.
# Copyright (C) 1996-1998 Thomas Gschwind
#
# 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
Since egcs and gcc-2.8.1 can handle exceptions on all the systems I
have access to, I use exceptions instead of error return codes. On
intel-machines gcc-2.7.2 should also work. On alpha machines gcc-2.7.2
does not work. gcc-2.8.1 seams to work everywhere. gcc versions prior
to 2.7.2 will not work as far as I know.
General installation instruction can be found in the file INSTALL.
NewsCache specific option of configure can be queried using configure
--help. For instance, use --without-syslog, if you prefer to use log
files instead of syslogd.
If you have installed some of the libraries (e.g. libwrap) needed by
NewsCache in places not known to configure, you have to set the
LDFLAGS environment variable. For example
env LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib ./configure
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
gschwind@complang.tuwien.ac.at. 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.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/NewsCache/
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