[STATUS] NNTP support (10/9/02)

[Michael Fair]

That's fantastic!

I'm especially looking forward to seeing the creative 
ways in which the two technologies can be used together.

Perhaps a separate thread should be opened on the list
that presents possible uses for the collaboration?

I expect that if Ken had some "expected uses" that any
special enhancements that were needed to make those
uses available could be planned for (not necessarily
implemented by Ken, but at least an attempt could be
made not to do anything to hinder them either).


I know that most of the references I saw regarding this
involved making Shared Folders and mailing lists more
accessible and less bulky (lots of individual copies of
messages lying around) but I'm still not certain about
how certain aspects would work.


For instance, assuming the news server requires 
authorization will the groups list match the list
of IMAP folders that authorization has?  Anynonymous
sees the anonymous list, usera sees an "INBOX" or "usera" 
group that is actually usera's INBOX plus their own folders, 
and the appropriate list of Shared Folders are shown based
on the ACLs for that authorization?


I can only assume that those of us running with the unix
hierarchy separator option turned on are just going to
have to train our users on why the folder names look different.
(Fortunately 2.2 also alleviates the only need that I had for
the unix hierarchy separator which was to do user at domain.dom
userids so this isn't that much an issue, at least not for me)


If being used to gateway external mailing lists, how will
"posting" be handled?  What will the "reply-to-group" button
present as the group address?  Will the NNTP server need to
proxy the message post (assuming the end user actually has
permission to post to the group)?  What can be done to 
prevent this feature from being abused as an open relay
(if there needs to be anything done)?


Will the news folders be accessible via the IMAP daemon?
Again how to handle posting?


That's really just an intial primer of questions I have.

I hope the questions are valuable to have answered here,
while I am more than happy to wait for the more complete
documentation I thought a discussion of these issue might 
be valuable to those of us interested in the NNTP feature.

-- Michael --

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken Murchison" <ken at oceana.com>
To: "Cyrus Mailing List" <info-cyrus at andrew.cmu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2002 1:12 PM
Subject: [STATUS] NNTP support (10/9/02)


> Just quick update for those who care.
> 
> The server side of nntpd (CVS 2.2 branch) appears to be fully functional
> and stable.  You can feed articles directly to it using the normal IHAVE
> or INN's STREAM mode (CHECK/TAKETHIS).
> 
> For those people who's rather "suck" news rather than having it fed to
> them, I wrote a fetchnews tool which you can use as an EVENT in
> cyrus.conf to connect to your upstream peer, and retrieve new articles
> and feed them to nntpd.
> 
> I have only these with INN, so I'd be interested in any incompatibilties
> with other news servers.  There is no specific documentation yet, but
> read the manpages and check out the news* options in imapd.conf.
> 
> Ken
> -- 
> Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
> Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
> 716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
> --PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
>