| InterNetNews | |
|---|---|
| Original author | Rich Salz |
| Developer | ISC |
| Initial release | 1991 (1991)[nb 1] |
| Stable release | |
| Written in | C, with some tools inPerl andPython |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Usenet server |
| License | MostlyISC license, with parts under other licenses[2] |
| Website | www |
| Repository | github |
InterNetNews (INN) is aUsenetnews server package, originally released byRich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992USENIX conference inSan Antonio, Texas. It was the first news server with integratedNNTP functionality.
While previous servers processed articles individually or in batches,innd is a single continuously running process that receives articles from the network, files them, and records what remote hosts should receive them. Readers can access articles directly from the disk in the same manner asB News andC News, but an included program, callednnrpd, also servesnewsreaders that employ NNTP.
A later improvement was the Cyclical NewsFilesystem (CNFS), which sequentially stores articles in large on-disk buffers. This method, implemented by Scott Fritchie, greatly increased performance by eliminating the operating system overhead needed to deal with thousands of individual article files.
James Brister'sinnfeed program was also added to the package. Likeinnd,innfeed operates continuously to feed articles out to other servers, while the earlierinnxmit processed them in batches. This combination allows articles to be received and redistributed with virtually no latency, and has substantially changed the nature of Usenet interaction by reducing the time for messages to be posted, read across the network and answered, from hours or days, to seconds or minutes. A similar earlier program, callednntplink, provided a comparable function, but it was produced independently.
INN is under active development as of February 2025[update]. The package is maintained by volunteers, and development is hosted by theInternet Systems Consortium. The current maintainer of INN is Russ Allbery, Julian Elie, and the ISC.[3]