ietf-nntp Verb: AVAILABLE returns available news servers.

[Richard Letts]

On Wed, 1 Oct 1997, Jack Hudler wrote:

> 
> I've been pondering the problem of distributed News Server running
> in regional areas. I noticed some large ISP's give out different
> news servers names/IP's to a block of customers based on regional
> location. This seems to me a clumsy way and with customer turnover
> a potential for this primitive attempt at load balancing to become 
> lopsided.

a) the DNS will return you a list of IP addresses; set the TTL of
responses to something sufficiently low and rely upon DNS round-robin to
load balance for you. 

b) this is an extension (so wrong list); Since nothing currently uses this
why not use the Service Location protocol to locate the service. Why
overload the news protocol with service location information.

c) nost news clients have LOTS of problems with non-monotonically
increasing article numbers and retreival based upon message ID can be slow
in non-optimised news servers. 

Richard Letts
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