What Is The Full Form Of NNTP?
The full form of NNTP is Network news transfer protocol.
NNTP is an application protocol that transports Usenet news articles (netnews) among the news servers so that the end-user client applications can post/read the articles. NNTP works as a client to Netscape, Opera, Internet Explorer, and various other web browsers. Browsers alternatively use the newsreader as well. A newsreader or a news client is a software app that reads the Usenet articles via NNTP or directly from the news server’s disks.
As the use of LAN and Internet exponentially increased over the years, the need to allow all newsreaders to be run on PCs connected to local networks increased. The resultant protocol was NNRP- resembling SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), and it was tailored to exchange newsgroup articles.
History of NNTP
- The process of sharing news over the Internet was very different earlier. There were possibilities of a centralized news service. And although such distributed file systems might work well with other computers and identical OS- such a system could not provide services to a wide client systems range.
- The NNTP came into the picture at this point. This made it easy for the USENET servers to interact with each other using NNTP on the internet.
- In the early 1990s, NNRP was proposed as a specialized type of NNTP for specific use by clients.
- The protocol never got completely implemented, but its name stayed in INN (InterNetNews) nnrpd program. Due to this, the subset of the standard NNTP commands for clients still refers to NNRP at times.
Characteristics of NNTP
- It connects various news group discussions to the internet.
- A client system can easily access Usenet remotely with zero hassle.
- NNTP servers manage a global network of newsgroups.
Commands Supported By NNTP
Here are a few examples of the commands supported by the NNTP:
- ARTICLE – to retrieve any article from a Usenet server.
- IHAVE – used to tell the server that the client has an article that the server may want.
- GROUP – for selecting a specific newsgroup.
- LIST – to recover a list of newsgroups that might be available on the server.
- NEWSGROUPS – for receiving a list of newsgroups that might have been created after a specific time and date.
- POST – to post a message or reply with an existing one.
- NEWNEWS – when receiving a list of articles that has been created after a specific time and date.
- NEXT – for going to the next message in any newsgroup.
Benefits of NNTP
- The command names are very easy to recall, for instance, IHAVE, ARTICLE, List, etc.
- NNTP requires no central server for operating.
- The users can use any news very easily.
- Communication of both types- server/server and client/server are supported.
Limitations of NNTP
- It is risky to let users into the bastion host to read the news.
- You can let your users deploy only NNTP clients for reading news from the bastion host, but not all readers are NNTP-capable.
- Depending on the server, getting some popular newsreader features may be impossible through NNTP, like article reading. Finding a server that has all the features for serving and transferring newsreaders becomes tricky.
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