InterNetNews (INN) is a

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

news server A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers. Articles an ...

package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992

USENIX USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

conference in

San Antonio, Texas San Antonio ( ; Spanish for "Anthony of Padua, Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the List of Texas metropolitan areas, third-largest metropolitan area in Texa ...

. It was the first news server with integrated

NNTP The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the Unive ...

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, but an included program, called ''nnrpd'', also serves newsreaders that employ NNTP. A later improvement was the Cyclical News Filesystem (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 an American non-profit corporation that supports the infrastructure of the universal, self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production-quality software, protocols, and ...

. The current maintainer of INN is Russ Allbery, Julian Elie, 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