[SunRescue] Router vs. PC with router/firewall software...

[David Cantrell]

"Mike Hebel" <drone8of9 at crosswinds.net> wrote:

> >>There are other choices too.  I use leafnode.  It seems to do the same as
> >>nntpcache.  It too can look like a 'normal' news server.  The way I use it
> >>is that it lives on my hosted server (an SS2, so we're back on-topic :-)
> >>and pulls my news down a couple of times a day.  I also have it installed
> >>on my Linux laptop, which connects to my server to get news.  I actually
> >>*read* news using Forte Agent running on the laptop under Wine, connecting
> >>to localhost.
> 
> *smoke starting to trickle out of ears*

My fault - I could have been clearer above.

> OK.  I'm now officially confused.
> What's the difference between using my SS2/LX (on-topic ;-) connected to a
> news feed versus a news server.  How is the feed different?  Push versus
> pull?

OK, there's two types of server involved in news.

There's NNTP, which is done by big servers.  Then there's NNRP which is
done by little servers, and by clients.  NNRP is (approximately) a subset
of NNTP so clients implementing NNRP can do all they need to do with
servers implementing either NNTP or NNRP.

The main difference between the two is that if you run an NNTP server,
like INN, then other news servers can 'push' stuff to you, whereas NNRP
is always 'pull'.

leafnode and (I believe) nntpcache both do NNRP.  So when they talk to
their upstream server to get news, they do pull instead of the server
doing push.

Big news servers listen for stuff to be pushed to them - and of course
they push stuff to other news servers.  That 'push' stream of data is
your traditional multi-gigabyte-per-day news feed.

You don't want a traditional feed.  You want 'pull'.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

   The voices said it's a good day to clean my weapons.