Minutes of netnews-wg meeting at RIPE 43

[Dave Wilson <]

Below is the first draft of the minutes from the netnews working group 
session at RIPE 43 today. Many thanks to Fernando Garcia for taking such 
complete notes and posting them so quickly. Thanks also of course to our 
speakers: Daniel Diaz, Robert Schuettler and Felix Kugler.

Best regards,
Dave


NetNews Working Group. 43 RIPE Meeting 12, September, 2002
------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------
Chairman: Dave Wilson (HEAnet)

Scribe: Fernando Garcia (Eurocomercial Informatica y Comunicaciones)

- Last agenda approved.

- Agenda bashing.

Administration tools

NHNS (Daniel Diaz)

  -----------------------------------

The web with all the information about the system is in
http://www.nhns.net

a) NHNS Goals,
Provide fresh Usenet out of band information to syncronize news services
Produce and maintaing tools to make news servers administration easier

What is transfered ‘out of band’ information
- Netnews hierarchy grouplists
- Group descriptions
- Group Moderators
- Hierarchy description

b) How is NHNS implemented
A newsgroup name maps into a DNS tree (reversion needed)
To map descriptions the IN TXT record is used
to map moderators the IN RP record is used
You can use DNS tools (dig, nslookup) toview of nhns tools (guins,
newsync, nhlookup, nh-xfer) to avoid reversion problem

c) Live presentation of the graphical nhns interface 1.0
- Show hierarchy description, hierarchy moderators, lookup one group
information (description and moderator), sync hierarchy
- the system uses tsig to authenticate updates.

d) PoC (1998)
First poc. 9 participants, ch.*,
es.*,at.*,it.*,italia.*,swnet.*,sfnet.*,no.*,dk.*
A non standard root was used (and thus dedicated name servers were
required), i.e. the mapping was something like test.es.usenet.
Results satisfactory

e) PoC (2000)
The same 9 participants and 400 autogenerated tlhs.
Now with integration into "normal" DNS tree and the use of existing
name servers is now straith forward, the mapping looks like
test.es.usenet.nhns.net...
Results also satisfactory

f) draft-diaz-nhns-01.txt
New draft published last month
Expires february 2003
General revision/correction
Updated tools described
Use of tsig in nhns and other recomendations


No questions are made

* NAS (Robert Schuettler).

--------------------------------

Information about NAS can be obtained in http://nas.fu-berlin.de/

The problems with netnews are the ones commented by Daniel

NAS simplify administration and usage

It’s a client-server system designed group up

Uses port 991 of TCP (assigned by the IANA)

Information is stored in XML and includes groups hierarchy,
administrator email and PGP, description, moderator, URL of netiquete,
URL of rules, etc.

The have a running implementation of the server in
nas2.cis.fu-berlin.de port 991

A library has been developed to easy the integration of NAS into
existing programs (clients and servers)

The 5th draft of the NAS was published may 2001, it has been submited
to the RFC editor and actually is in the queue to the IESG.

Felix Kugler. ask If there was any comment in the NNTP group of the IETF
Robert answers that only one about the GETP command

Another atendee ask what is the main target of NAS: integration on the
client? administration?
Robert answers that simplify use of the netnews

Felix Kugler ask if there are more news servers participating
Robert answers No, no more news servers participating in the NAS trials

Daniel Diaz says that NAS has the same purpose than NHNS but uses a new
protocol and a new TCP port.
NAS, dns and NHNS make the same things, but NHNS only with query an
axfr. No need for more things.

Robert Schuettler answers that there are some advantajes of not using
DNS.
- You dont clog the DNS with netnews information
- nobody that uses dns need the netnews information
- dns is not made for large tranfers of data
- you have security problems in dns

Dave Wilson says that is nice to have to posibilities and both can
coexist. Daniel and Robert agree and says thatwe should let them go and
see what happen

An atendee comment that we need a news hierarclhy to be trusted, we
dont need new protocols

Robert Schuettler answers that we need a system to administrate the
hierarchy

Dave Wilson says that it would be nice to have a system to get al the
hierarchy in a reliable manner

newsbone (Felix Kugler)
--------------------------------
For those who don’t know, Newsbone is a overlay network for the
distribution of netnews. It is built from servers meeting certain
criteria in terms of feed diversity, hierarchies supported, and
monitoring facilities.
It was born on january 1997 in a RIPE meeting
It promoted open monitoring for news servers
The Newsbone pages are currently located and administrated by the
SWITCH network. In it you can see participants, isp, status, country,
lastmod, news server address, and a link to their monitoring pages.

Now, 5 years later, the situation has changed considerably:

-  monitoring software is available for commons news server software
-  most prevalent problem of news distribution is no longer bandwidth,
   but server performance
-  it is difficult to keep the newsbone participant page up to date
-  there are doubts about the need of newsbone

Switch announces that it will stop newsbone activities in may 2003
(RIPE 45)
volunteers to continue newsbone efforts are welcome

Fernando Garcia ask how many active participants are in the newsbone now
Felix answers that there are 21 Newsbone compliant sites

Traffic growth -discussion
--------------------------------
Dave Wilson ask if there are statistics on actual traffic growth

Otmar Lendi says he receives 50 gigs of news each day.

Dave ask is there a mechanism to see if there is a problem and that it
would be interesting to check traffic growth and compare to bandwith
and Moore law

Felix Kugler shows some numbers he got using flowstat
 From 95 today the increase was from 1 article second to 18 articles/seg
and from 0 mb/sec to 28 megs/seg.
Steady traffic growth up to 2001, 35 to 50%in the number of articles
100 to 200%for data volume.
At SWITCH, growth of all traffic, active groups and article size has
leveled out during the last 9 months. Other attendees' comments,
however, point out that is most likely a local effect!

Otmar Lendi says there are very few servers in Europe than can cope
with the traffic today.
Many isps in Austria used satellite feed (cidera) of news, but they
have drop many groups to cope with bandwith
His experience with customers is give them porn and mp3 and they will
not complain.

Felix Kugler says there can be legal problems if administrators
involves in actively modifying newsgroups lists.

Dave Wilson says he will try to get numbers about all of this for the
next meeting.

AOB

Nothing more.