NNTP News Server Features - A Non-Programmer's Guide to Web Crossing

The Web Crossing server can act as a full-featured NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) News Server. Each folder can be set independently to receive from and send to other NNTP news servers. The uses for this are many and include:

Before setting your NNTP server settings, there are a few concepts that should be understood.

When receiving messages from another NNTP server, there are two methods that can be used. You can either rely on the other server to "push" new messages to you according to rules set by the other server, or you can "pull" new messages in from the other server yourself.

What are the advantages of one method over another? The traditional way of receiving Internet newsgroups has been to allow the other side to push messages to the receiving server. Many NNTP servers only allow this method, so you may have no choice. You should ask the newsgroup administrator of the providing server if your Web Crossing NNTP server must be set to allow pushed messages to be received. Push is inconvenient, however, for two reasons:

The pull method means that your Web Crossing NNTP server goes and gets new messages itself, without waiting for any action from the other side. Sometimes this method is called "Client-side protocol" because this is the method used by newsreader programs to access newsgroups and Web Crossing acts like a newsreader program when it uses pull. Generally pull is easier to set up because you can freely add and remove newsgroups. However the NNTP server you are connecting too may only support push transfers. Check with the NNTP administrator you wish to transfer messages with to be sure.

Likewise, when sending message to another NNTP server you can choose to push them or wait and have the other server pull them from your site. Again, you may have no choice in which method you choose. The other server may require you to push messages. It is very common for NNTP servers to have no pull feature, and thus they may depend on your site pushing messages to them.

If you are creating a gateway server to provide messages for many different Web Crossing servers it is convenient to let the other servers pull messages from you and push messages to you. That way all you have to do is set the correct permissions settings on your site and leave the actual accessing up to other servers.

All TCP/IP services, such as web serving, mail, telnet, FTP and news, access servers at a particular port number. The port number is what is used to distinguish one TCP/IP service from another. The most commonly used port number for web users is Port 80, which is the default port number used for web browser access.

The default NNTP service port number is 119. You should make sure that your NNTP port number matches that of the other NNTP servers you are connecting to.

The master switch to turn on news services is located in Control Panel > News service (NNTP).

In most cases you can leave the remaining settings at their default values. The remaining values are mostly self-explanatory:

To set Web Crossing to mirror newsgroups, you must check the box labeled Enable newsgroup (NNTP) mirroring (master switch). This checkbox turns on and off NNTP news server features.

Next you can set default settings for outgoing NNTP messages. Each folder can override these settings on a folder-by-folder basis. So you can leave this setting blank if you want to only use custom settings for each folder. But it is often convenient to set a default here, particularly if you want to use the same settings for many different folders.

The incoming messages settings are similar to the outgoing settings. The differences are:

Note: Suppose you want to send messages to and receive messages from multiple servers. What is the best way to accomplish this? The easiest thing to do is (1) let the other servers push to your site and (2) allow the other servers pull from your site. There is no special setting needed for allowing other servers to access your site and pull from your folders. This is just the same settings that a newsreader program would have, using the regular permissions settings as established by your access lists.

Other NNTP settings are:

Date range for legal NNTP posts.
Posts that are either too old or too far in the future can be rejected. The defaults are any age for old messages, and no more than 10 minutes in the future. This is a common setting for Unix NNTP servers, and helps prevent the transfer of outdated or misposted news items. You should be sure your server's time zone and time are set correctly when sending and receiving newsgroup messages.

NNTP forwarding
This feature allows you to forward newsgroups to other servers, according to newsgroup name. This can be used to split up a feed into smaller sub-feeds, and can also be used to send the same incoming newsgroup posts to multiple servers. This is particularly useful if you are gating with large Internet newsgroups. The entire volume of all the Internet newsgroups exceeds billions of bytes of data per day. Even you had the bandwidth to support them all, you would still want to be able to split your server resources among the different groups.

Setting a Folder for Newsreader Access

To set a folder for newsreader access all you need to do is give a folder a unique newsgroup name. Go to any Web Crossing folder and press the Edit Folder button. The second entry is Newsgroup name. Simply enter a name here that is in "newsgroup format." For some examples of setting up newsgroup names for your site, see the section on newsreader access.

Troubleshooting

I am getting errors about "port already in service" when I start up Web Crossing.

If you are already running a news service on the same server machine, make sure it is not using the same IP address and port number combination. This is most likely to happen if you installed a Unix server and asked for news services to be installed by default. If there is an existing news service running with the same IP address and port number, you will see error messages in the webx.log file when you startup Web Crossing. To avoid this problem, choose a port number other than the default 119. Note that Web Crossing also supports multihoming for NNTP services. If you have more than one IP address on the same server machine Web Crossing will only listen for NNTP accesses on its own IP address and port setting. If you want to use the standard Port 119 on more than one IP address you should make sure that your other news server programs also support multihoming If they do not, they will pick up accesses to Web Crossing and this will cause conflicts.

I am not able to send messages to the other NNTP server.

Check the following settings:
- Make sure the master switches are set correctly, turning on both NNTP news services and also NNTP mirroring.
- Make sure the port numbers match.
- Make sure you have set the IP addresses correctly for the other server.
- If you are depending on the other server to pull messages from your site, make sure the other server has permission to do so. That is, if the folder is in a restricted area, make sure the other server has the ability to login and give a username and password (like a newsreader program allows). Likewise, if you are pushing to a server that requires a username and password, make sure you have set these correctly.

I don't see a place to set my newsgroup name when I press the Edit Folder button.

Unless you have first turned on the master switch for news services, this item will not appear in the Edit Folder settings.

Resources

Sysop Documentation

syshelp.htm#NNTP

Sysop Control Panel

News Service (NNTP)