ietf-nntp Virtual NewsGroup hosting

[Russ Allbery]

Tim Roberts <troberts at bigfoot.com> writes:

> I always thought that News Hosting should be one of the virtual services
> offered by an ISP similiar to mail or http so that if I connect to
> news.virtualhost.com - I would only see the newsgroups that are being
> hosted by virtualhost.com (versus every newsgroup being hosted by the
> ISP).

INN already supports this in the current version; you can use any of the
mechanisms that readers.conf supports to distinguish between users from
different domains (so the login, the origin IP address, ident responses,
whatever).  In fact, INN has supported this to a limited extent for many
years; you could exclude groups in the old nnrp.access file and they
wouldn't show up to connecting clients matching that line, even as a
result of a LIST command.  I think this was around as far back as 1.5 or
older; I know it was in 1.7.2.

I use this to hide the internal newsgroups that we use to gateway all of
our role addresses to anyone other than staff members.

I don't think this really requires any extensions to the protocol (apart
from the standard authentication extensions).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>