ietf-nntp Virtual hosts in NNTP servers

[Joao Prado Maia]

On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Jeffrey M. Vinocur wrote:

> As for the second case (differing content), it's not so clear how much 
> benefit there is in NNTP.  It's hard to imagine a case where a request for 
> headers from e.g. news.software.nntp would have a different *meaning* 
> depending on what hostname you used for the news server.  The obvious uses 
> are to restrict permissions in some fashion (restrict group list, allow 
> posting vs read-only, etc).  But it's a bit odd to say that a user 
> connecting from the same IP would get more privliges using one hostname 
> than another -- it's certainly not a wise form of security.  So it's hard 
> to see much benefit here.
> 

Well, here's more details about my specific case. I maintain a small 
project to create an NNTP server that acts as a gateway to several data 
sources, which can be mailing lists, web based message boards or even 
mailbox files. If you want to take a look at it, more details are 
available here -> http://papercut.org

Now, this simple objective to serve mailing lists messages archived in a 
database doesn't require replication (until now), so the request for 
newsgroup 'archive.mailing_list_name' for hostname 'archiver.org' wouldn't 
work for hostname 'anotherhost.com'.

My point is, I basically want to be able to have just one IP address and 
run my NTTP server for both domains, serving different contents for the 
appropriate hostnames.

While I understand that this is pretty far from the normal usage of NNTP, 
it is still a valid use case :)

Cheers,
Joao