Provision of Local Newsgroups

  With the software currently available it is expensive to provide local newsgroups in addition to the newsgroups provided by the feeding news server.

It seems obvious to set up another news server providing the local newsgroups and let the news reader decide which news server to contact for which newsgroups. This configuration is shown in figure 3.3(a). This method does not require access to the news server holding the global newsgroups. Unfortunately most news readers do not support news retrieval from different news servers.

    

Abbildung 3.3: Provision of local newsgroups

Thus, the only way to accomplish this is to set up a news server holding both the local and the global newsgroups. Figure 3.3(b) shows this configuration. This method requires neither access to the news server holding the global newsgroups nor a news reader being able to distinguish between different news servers. However, this method has some disadvantages.

• The administrator of the local news server has to manage a news spool for the global newsgroups in addition to the local newsgroups. This extra management work is a time consuming task.
• More network bandwidth is required, because the articles of all global newsgroups have to be transferred to the local site, even if these articles will never be accessed by the users of the local news server. This is even worse if the connection to the feeding news server is fast enough to retrieve the articles on demand only.
• The local news server requires more hardware: more disk space, because all articles have to be stored, a more powerful processor, because the articles in the local and the global newsgroups have to be indexed and even a better network adapter is required, because increased network traffic has to be handled.

This proves that it is expensive to operate a news server with local and global groups just for the provision of local newsgroups. Hence a better solution has to be found where local and global groups can be combined without setting up a news server with a full feed and without modification to any news server or reader. Figure 3.4 outlines such a configuration.

  

Abbildung 3.4: Merging local and global newsgroups by an intermediate server