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

[Robert Schuettler]

* Lawrence Greenfield <leg+ at andrew.cmu.edu> [29.04.02 20:13]:

> I think this is important work if people want netnews to continue
> to be a viable means of communication.  I find the current
> control messages and bootstrapping (ftp a newsgroup file from...) to
> be hard to fathom.

Thank you. NAS would really come in handy at times with our newsserver
(News.CIS.DFN.DE).

> (What's a "wildmat"?  Is the ISC-INN documentation required
> forsuccessful implementation?)

The wildmat pattern is indeed adopted from INN - instead of
(re)defining it in the draft exactly as it is used there.

> What is the authentication used for?  If all of the messages are
> PGP signed what is the authentication needed?  It appears to only
> be attached to GETA & GETP.  Are none of the other commands security
> sensitive?

GETA and GETP are the only commands that will make changes to a NAS
server's database. All other commands just query the database.

> No way for a server to send just the things that have changed since
> the timestamp?

We would like to save diff for protocol version 1+n.

We have developed a prototype implementation of NAS. An NAS server is
running at nas2.cis.fu-berlin.de, port 991 - if you want to take a
look.

Best regards, Robert

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