The Sysadmin’s Daily Grind: Leafnode

GROUP THERAPY

Article from Issue 59/2005
Author(s):

Leafnode is a Usenet server for small sites where just a few users need access to a large number of groups. The Leafnode server is designed to recover from errors autonomously and needs very little attention.

If you are faced with the task of setting up a news server, you might discover INN in your package management tool. The INN daemon is powerful and flexible, and it scales well. On the downside, INN can be hungry on resources, depending on the configuration and peerings, and maintenance is not exactly trivial. In fact, INN is total overkill for smaller workgroups, and this is where Leafnode steps in. Although Leafnode is formally an NNTP server, it might be more fitting to refer to Leafnode as a news proxy. To save resources, the Leafnode server does not attempt to store every article in every newsgroup. If a user subscribes to a newsgroup, Leafnode will tell the user that the postings for the group are not available and offer to fetch the postings from a real news server.

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