How Does Usenet Handle News?
Today, Usenet has grown to enormous proportions. Sites that carry the whole of netnews usually transfer something like a paltry sixty megabytes a day. Of course this requires much more than pushing around files. So let’s take a look at the way most systems handle Usenet news. News is distributed through the net by various transports. The historical medium used to be UUCP, but today the main traffic is carried by Internet sites. The routing algorithm used is called flooding: Each site maintains a number of links (news feeds) to other sites. Any article generated or received by the local news system is forwarded to them, unless it has already been seen at that site, in which case it is discarded. A site may find out about all other sites the article has already traversed by looking at the Path: header field. This header contains a list of all systems the article has been forwarded by in bang path notation. To distinguish articles and recognize duplicates, Usenet articles have to carry a
Related Questions
- Access to other newsgroups is still possible using an alternative server. See FAQ: How do I configure my software to give access to Usenet News?
- How do I set up my usenet account with a third party news reader program such as Microsoft Outlook Express or Free Agent?
- What apsfilter news groups are available in USENET?
