Please visit our official NewsCache homepage at http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/NewsCache/.

NewsCache

Introduction

NewsCache is a cache server for the Usenet News system. NewsCache solves some of the problems of today's News system. Among these problems are:

• High load on the news server
• High network bandwidth requirements
• It is difficult to provide local newsgroups

These problems have been shown in my masters thesis. To show that caching can solve many of those problems, a prototype cache server has been implemented (NewsCache-0.9). The thesis is available in postscript (.ps 1.3M, .ps.gz 241K) and HTML format.

Current Version

The current version of NewsCache is 0.9.13. This version already includes autoconf, offline news reading, server multiplexing, access control and other features. Suggestions and bug fixes are welcome! NewsCache is available under the GNU General Public License and may be downloaded using HTTP or FTP.

Version 1.0 of NewsCache will be released within the next days. It comes with a new newsgroup-database that fixes several problems of the old version of NewsCache.

• Small articles are stored within the database. This improves performance and reduces the number of inodes used of your system.
• The overview-database is generated on the fly for articles already cached by the cache-server. This reduces the amount of disc-space used, but decreases performance slightly.
• The newsgroup-database is now managed as an array instead of a list, which improves performance further.

News Readers

The following news readers have been tested in combination with NewsCache (A detailed compatibility list is also available):

gnus, knews, netscape, slrn, tin, xrn, ...

During the evaluation, we also found out that many news readers mark deleted articles as read. This can be a problem, if NewsCache is used in offline mode. See the compatibility list for a detailed description of this flaw.

Documentation, Mailing List, etc.

Currently, we have submitted papers to the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems and to the 1998 Usenix Annual Technical Conference. The first one presents our proposed Usenet News Infrastructure and the second one the implementation of NewsCache.

A mailing list for NewsCache will be installed this or the next week. To subscribe to the mailing list or simply if you have problems installing or running NewsCache, please send me an email. I will collect these questions and write a FAQ on NewsCache.

Thomas Gschwind