ietf-nntp Virtual NewsGroup hosting

[Russ Allbery]

Tim Roberts <troberts at bigfoot.com> writes:

> If I understand you correctly - INN supports virtual hosting based on
> the USER and not the intended server?!?

Right, exactly the same as POP.

This isn't the ideal for virtual hosting (the way HTTP does it is more
convenient), but it seems to work reasonably well for POP.  For an
internal news server, you can use IP-based virtual hosting under most
circumstances.  For an external news server, if you're already doing
authentication, this already works.

What it doesn't cover is the case where you want to provide a publically
accessible news server for a variety of different newsgroups without
assigning multiple IP addresses.  My question, in that situation, is why
it matters whether all the newsgroups are visible to each alias for the
news server?

What do you anticipate people will use unauthenticated
publically-accessible newsgroups for that hiding newsgroups based on what
server you connect to would be a useful feature?

> Example: lets say that an ISP is virtually hosting news.cool.com (which
> has cool.* groups) and news.verycool.com (which has verycool.* groups).

> If I (using my newsreader) were to connect to news.cool.com - are you
> saying that (given I am setup in the config to 'see' both) that I would
> see both cool.* and verycool.* groups even though I connect to
> news.cool.com?

If you're trying to do unauthenticated virtual hosting, yes.

I'm not opposed to the idea of adding some sort of command to handle this
case (the example that you want to look at is the proposal for doing ftp
virtual hosting, btw, as news isn't anything at all like HTTP).  It just
doesn't strike me as a major need.

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