ietf-nntp Discussion of draft-dfncis-netnews-admin-sys-04.txt

[Robert Schuettler]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 10:39:48AM +0100, Charles Lindsey wrote:

> You still have not addressed the fundamental question of why a brand new
> internet protocol is needed to do this job, when a simple extension to the
> Netnews protocols (or perhaps even no extenion at all in the first
> instance) would enable this data to be propagated by Netnews itself.

Let me repeat what I said in June:

| I believe that this discussion has already taken place on the usefor-
| list (March 2000). Instead of repeating it, let me just underline that
| NAS does not claim to be the one "proper" attempt but is explicitly
| designed to work in coexistence with other mechanisms. We know about
| the NHNS approach but believe that NAS is more versatile.

> Alternatively, there are solutions based on the use of DNS (and those
> soliutions have even been deployed on an experimental basis).

An NAS server is running on nas2.cis.fu-berlin.de port 991 with some
testdata. Simple client software is available upon request. If you're
using slrn, there is an add-on for NAS functionality that I can forward
to you if you'd like. A web-interface that queries the NAS server is
available for testing purposes at: http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~rober/nas_web

> In addition, your proposal still seems to require the existence of a
> unique top-level site (TINTLS) for the root of the system, but provides no
> machinery to set it up.

nas.cis.fu-berlin.de could act as a root-server for the time being.
"Secondary" root-servers could be set up in every continent or country
later on so that there would be no massive load on just one server.
These could query the primary root-server which would just answer to
them, etc. It's a bit like DNS really. If someone was unhappy with the
whole system, they could even set up an alternative root-server (just
as Alternic is doing for DNS). It would be up to the NAS clients which
distributed data to use.

-- 
Robert Schuettler                     | rober at cis.fu-berlin.de
Freie Universitaet Berlin             |
Center for Information Services (CIS) | http://www.cis.fu-berlin.de