newbie question: state of the art/practice for private newsgroups?

[Miles Fidelman]

Hi Folks,

I've been thinking of using a collection of private newsgroups as an 
alternative to collection of private email lists.

I know that, at one point, there was a bit of work on supporting
private newsgroups - primarily by proprietary products (Netscape used
to sell something, and Lotus Domino did something similar).  I also
know that there's a level of support for various crypto-based
authentication schemes in various news servers.  And I suspect there's
some technology lying around from DoD's use of NNTP in the JOPES system.

What I'm wondering is the current state of the art/practice.  What
would be a good starting point for building something along the lines
of:
- 3-5 replicated servers
- 15-20 groups
- 3-5000 users
- peer-to-peer authentication among servers
- crypto-based authentication of users, with access control on a user-
newsgroup level (ideally using kerberos or LDAP for central user
administration)
- encryption and signing of messages

Any thoughts, pointers to reference materials, etc.?

Thanks very much,

Miles Fidelman


-- 
Miles Fidelman, Principal
Protocol Technologies Group