NewsCache

NewsCache can be easily configured using GNU autoconf. If you have never installed a software package that uses autoconf, please have a look at these installation instructions.

For the impatient: Simply unpack the distribution and run ./configure --help for a list of configuration options. To configure, compile and install NewsCache, simply run ./configure configuration-options; make; make install.

User's Manual

I have started writing a manual on NewsCache which can be found here. The most recent version of the manual can alwas be found in the NewsCache distribution as texinfo file.

Mailing List

A mailing list for NewsCache is available at newscache@infosys.tuwien.ac.at. To subscribe to the mailing list, send an email with with subscribe in the message body to newscache-request@infosys.tuwien.ac.at.

Publications

[1] Thomas Gschwind. A Cache Server for Usenet News. Master's thesis, Technische Universität Wien, May 1997. [.ps (1.3M), .ps.gz (241K)]

The Master's thesis explains the problems of Usenet News and presents caching as one solution to these problems and presents a prototype cache implementation for Usenet News.

[2] Thomas Gschwind and Manfred Hauswirth. A Cache Architecture for Modernizing the Usenet Infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 1999. [.ps (240k), .ps.gz (50k)]

This article presents the problems of the current Usenet Infrastructure, presents, and evaluates different solution strategies. The article comes to the conclusion that the most promising solution is the use of cache servers at the access infrastructure and thus separating the distribution from the access infrastructure.

[3] Thomas Gschwind and Manfred Hauswirth. NewsCache---A High Performance Cache Implementation for Usenet News. In Proceedings of the 1999 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 1999. [.ps (160k), .ps.gz (50k)]

This article presents the design and implementation of NewsCache and compares its news spool organization to the spool organizations of other news servers like NNTPCACHE or INN. We compare different cache replacement strategies and give an evaluation of the benefits of caching Usenet News based on our experiments with NewsCache.

History

Some users have asked, how I came up with the idea of caching. In spring 1995 the news server at Technische Universität Wien had severe problems to store arriving articles since the news server was no longer powerful enough to handle the incoming feed. At that time questions came up, whether it is necessary that our university stores all of the newsgroup or to install our own news server.

Facing this situation, the solution was obvious for me (the news server of our university is only a leaf node news server). Finally, I asked Manfred Hauswirth, whether he would be interested to supervise this topic as my masters thesis and..... (I assume you can figure out the remaining part by yourself ;) )

Contact