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

[Raphaël Barrois]

Hi,

I'm using this kind of setup on my personal server (without replication, but I 
never felt the need for it).

I'm using innd, and have set up my readers.conf to read a custom Python script 
which looks up into my LDAP and reads some custom group fields there.

I'm using kerberos for authentication, but not in the usual way: the NNTP 
password is sent in plain text (through SSL) by the client to the server, 
which checks it server side ; I couldn't find a client with kerberos support 
available.

This setup works well with various NNTP clients (thunderbird, knode, windows 
mail, ...), and with several hundreds of clients and groups.

I'm not using anything for message signing, but I think this could work as 
well ; I don't have any web interface setup, but I know of some existing 
library which might be helpful here: 
http://git.polytechnique.org/?p=banana.git

I can send you my current scripts as well (I don't have access to them right 
now).

-- 
Raphaël

Le Monday 07 February 2011 à 17:35:34, Miles Fidelman a écrit :
> 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