NETWORK AND DATA COMMUNICATIONS

USENET
NEWS

Anu Suresh
 How USENET i s
impl em ente d?
• Smaller newsgroups are
implemented as mailing lists.
• But Usenet is not generally
implemented using mailing lists due
to some reasons.
• Each site stores the incoming mail in
a single directory.
• These in turn have subdirectories.
• ie; each site needs only one copy of
each news article, no matter how
many people subscribe to its
 CONT . . .

• To use USENET, a site must have a

‘newsfeed’ from another site on
USENET.
• Set of all sites that get net news can
be thought of as the nodes of a
directed graph.
 TRANSMI SSI ON
...
• Each site that wants news can poll its
newsfeed(s).
• This is to know if any new news has
arrived since the previous contact.
• Then that news is collected and
stored in the appropriate
subdirectory of news.
• Thus, news diffuses around the
network
 RE ST RI CTION S . . .
• Not every site gets all newsgroups.
• There are 3 reasons for this.
• First, the total newsfeeds exceeds
500MB per day and is growing
rapidly.
• Second, transmission time and cost
are issues.
• Third, not every site is interested in
every topic.
 NEWS LAYOUT . . .
News articles have the same format as RFC 822
email messages, but have few extra headers.
Eg of a news article is shown
From: Vogel@nyu.edu
Messageid: < 54323@nyu.edu>
Subject: XYZ
Path:cs.u.nl!sun4nl!EU.net!news.sprintlink.net!in2.uu.net!pc144.nyu.
edu!news
Newsgroups: rec.birds
Followup To:rec.birds
Distribution:world
Nntp-Posting-host: nuthatch.bio.nyu.edu
Refrences:
Organization:New York University
Lines:1
Summary: xyz
Sgfdfghsdfgsdfgaf.

XYZ
NETWORK NEWS TRANSFER PROTOCOL (NNTP)
• To avoid the flooding of articles onto every
line within usenet, NNTP was introduced.
• In this, client issues commands in ASCII
and a server issuing responses as decimal
nos coded in ASCII.
• NNTP was designed for two purposes.
• First, to allow news articles to propagate
from one m/c to another over a reliable
connection.
• Second, to allow users to read news
remotely, whose desktop computers
cannot receive news.
 NNTP. . .
• Both techniques are widely used, but
concentration is on how news articles
spread out over the n/w using NNTP.
• 2 general approaches are possible
here.
• First one, news pull, the client calls
one of its newsfeeds and asks for
new news.
• Second one, news push, the
newsfeed calls the client and
announces that it has news.
 NNTP . . .
• To acquire recent articles, a client
must first establish a TCP connection
with port 119 on one of its
newsfeeds.
• Behind this port is the NNTP daemon.
• After the connection is established,
the client and server communicate
using a sequence of commands and
responses.
 The principal NNTP
NNTP…. commands for news
diffusion
Command Meaning
LIST Give me a list of all newsgroups and
articles you have
NEWSGROUPS Give me a list of newsgroups created
after date/time
date time
GROUP grp Give me a list of all grp

NEWNEWS grps Give me a list of new articles in

specified groups
date time
ARTICLE id Give me specific article

POST I have an article for you that was

posted here
IHAVE id I have Article id. Want it?

QUIT Terminate the session

THANK YOU