Microsoft recently released Microsoft Commercial Internet System (MCIS), formerly code-named Normandy (for information about Normandy, see Mark Joseph Edwards, "The Normandy Invasion," February 1997). MCIS is a set of services for businesses breaking onto the Internet. One of these services is a standards-based Internet News Server (INS) that integrates fully into the Internet USENET standards. INS lets clients with Microsoft's Internet News reader or a third-party Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) news reader such as WinVN retrieve messages from or post messages to newsgroups on your news server. You can also use INS to capture news feeds from and distribute news feeds to other news servers on the Internet. Microsoft's INS complies with Request for Comment (RFC) 977, Network News Transfer Protocol, and RFC 1036, Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages.
INS installs on top of Microsoft's Web server, Internet Information Server (IIS). You configure and manage INS with the IIS Internet Service Manager (ISM). INS supports standard NNTP functionality and includes many features from other IIS-based systems. Such features include multiple authentication methods, database logging features, and domain filtering.
INS has too many IIS-related features to cover here, so this article assumes you are familiar with installing, configuring, and managing IIS. This article covers only NNTP basics, installing INS, and configuring a news client to access newsgroups on an MCIS news server. Look for a future article on configuring news feeds between a Microsoft news server and a USENET news server on the Internet, and on configuring the Internet News Service in Exchange Server 5.0.
Internet News Primer
A news server is a computer that collects and distributes news articles. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) supply news servers for their customers, and many companies are increasingly using news servers to disseminate information to their employees, customers, and the general public.
Users who want to read news items must install and configure a standards-based news reader, such as Microsoft's Internet News reader, that points to the IP address of their ISP's or company's news server. If you install and configure a news reader to point to Microsoft's news server at news.ms-normandy.com, you get a list of newsgroups that Microsoft hosts. Screen 1 shows Microsoft's Internet News reader client browsing messages in the comp.home.automation newsgroup.
In the example in Screen 1, Glen Blanchard posted a message about a problem with his electric blanket. Within a few days, three people responded to Glen's message and another user responded to one of the respondents. Each newsgroup is a distributed discussion group (i.e., users anywhere in the world can read and post messages on their local news server). Various news servers then replicate newsgroups and news items over the Internet from one news server to another. For example, Glen posted his request on a news server in Dallas, Texas. Mike Unger read Glen's message and posted his reply on a news server in Knoxville, Tennessee. Edward Cheung posted his reply on a news server at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Ian Shef posted his response to Hughes Missile Systems' news server.
Almost anyone can create a news server on the Internet and grant rights to create newsgroups on that server or post items to a newsgroup. The proliferation of newsgroups on the Internet is incredible. For example, Microsoft's Normandy news server hosted about 1000 newsgroups (either as the primary news server or replicated from other news servers on the Internet) at the time of this writing. The list of public newsgroups, which is available through many ISPs, numbered more than 13,000 as of February 1997. Active newsgroups can receive several hundred new postings every day.
News servers gather and distribute news using NNTP, a set of standards for the distribution, inquiry, retrieval, and posting of news articles. An NNTP application operates at the application layer of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) stack and runs over a TCP/IP network. Figure 1 shows a simple topology where desktop user Spyros uses the Microsoft Internet News reader client to read and post messages to the alexandria.social newsgroup on the kifissia.sakes.com news server.
Spyros's news client uses TCP/IP to connect to port 119 of the kifissia.sakes.com news server and sends commands to request data. Section 3 of RFC 977 defines the commands, including
Article
Group
List
Newnews
Post
Quit
When a news client sends a command, the news server returns a result code to signal the success or failure of the command. Figure 2 shows a sample dialog between a news client and news server. In the sample dialog, Spyros's client opens a connection to the news server. The server responds with the result code 200, confirming that the server is running an NNTP service and identifying itself.
Next, the news client asks the news server for a list of active newsgroups, and the news server responds with result code 215 and returns a list of four newsgroups, as you see in Figure 2 at Callout A. The news client switches to the alexandria.social newsgroup, and the news server confirms the switch with result code 211. The news client uses the newnews command to ask the news server for any articles posted after 1:05 p.m. on January 12, 1997. The news server confirms the request with result code 230 and sends back a list of three message-IDs, as you see in Figure 2 at B.
The news client asks for the current (last) article with the article command. The news server confirms this request with result code 220 and sends back the text for this article, using a line with one period to terminate the response, as you see in Figure 2 at C. The news client terminates the connection with the news server using the quit command, and the news server confirms the command with result code 205.
You can view this client and server exchange process directly by using Telnet to make a TCP connection to port 119 of an NNTP host and then manually sending the commands as if you were a news reader client. In fact, I took this approach to capture the commands in Figure 2.