At 11:41 AM 4/8/2002, Jason Stewart wrote:

 > I am willing to try to help on this. I am no expert on NNTP but I 
have
 > set up a private server before. I think we could use my machine for
 > testing but I don't know if it can handle the traffic or not. I have
 > a DSL connection with 768kbps each way.

It would be very helpful to at least do some testing.  I don't have any 
idea how much bandwidth is required to support a news server for Boost.

 > I have been experimenting with authenticating posters and readers
 > against a
 > database. It should be possible and I have had some success but I'm 
not
 > quite there yet.

Couple of points:

To experiment with a news server, we can start with just 
mail-to-news.  That requires not authentication, IIUC.

We could then start allowing a bit of posting using just a 
Username/password protected interface where everyone shares the same 
username/password.

(If you can figure out how to setup true member authentication right 
away, great, but I'm not sure that is necessary for rev 1.)

 > I also have never set up a gateway between a mailing list and a NNTP
 > server but I understand that mailman has some facilities for this.

Mailman appears simple to set up.  It can provide mail-to-news,
news-to-mail, or both direction gateway services.

The key Mailman options seem to be:

* "The Internet address of the machine your News server is running on"

"The News server is not part of Mailman proper. You have to already 
have access to a NNTP server, and that NNTP server has to recognize the 
machine this mailing list runs on as a machine capable of reading and 
posting news"

I guess this should be "news.boost.org", and that we've set our DNS 
server to resolve that to your IP address.

* "The name of the Usenet group to gateway to and/or from."

Something like "boost.general"? (I'm assuming there will be boost.user, 
etc, in the future.)

--Beman

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