• innxmit reads a file identifying articles and offers
  them to another site;
• ctlinnd sends control commands to innd ;
• nnrpd is an NNTP server oriented for newsreaders.

Of these programs, the most important is innd.
We first mention enough of its architecture to give a
context for the other programs, and then discuss its
design and features in more detail at the end of this
section.

Innd is a single daemon that receives all
incoming articles, files them, and queues them up for
propagation. It waits for connections on the NNTP
port. When a connection is received, a getpeer-
name (2) is done. If the host is not in an access file,
then an nnrpd process is spawned with the connec-
tion tied to its standard input and output. 3 It is worth
noting that nnrpd is only about 3,500 lines of code,
and 20% of them are for the ``POST'' command,
used to verify the headers in a user's article. Nnrpd
provides all NNTP commands except for ``IHAVE''
and an incomplete version of ``NEWNEWS''. On
the other hand, it does provide extensions for
pattern -matching on an article header and listing
exactly what articles are in a group. The NNTP pro-
tocol seems to be a good example of the UNIX philo-
sophy: it is small, general, and powerful and can be
implemented in a very small program.

Articles are usually forwarded by having innd
record the article in a ``batchfile'' which is pro-
cessed by another program. For Internet sites, the
innxmit program is used to offer articles to the host
specified on its command line.4 The input to innxmit
is a set of lines containing a pathname to the article
and its Message -ID. Since the Message -ID is in the
batchfile, innxmit does not have to open the article
and scan it before offering the article to the remote
site. This can give significant savings if the remote
site already has a percentage of the articles.

[0] { ".", 1 }; 
 [1] { placeholder }; 
 [2] { "\r\n" } 
 

To write a line, the placeholder was filled in with a
pointer to the buffer, and its length, and a single wri-
tev was done, starting from either element zero or
one. While this implementation was clever, and
simpler then what was done elsewhere, it was not
very fast. Innxmit now uses a 16k buffer and only
does a write when the next line would not fit. This
is also consistent with ideas used throughout the rest
of INN: use the read and write system calls,
referencing the data out of large buffers while avoid-
ing the copying commonly done by the standard I/O
library.

The ctlinnd program is used to tell the innd
server to perform special tasks. It does this by com-
municating over a UNIX -domain datagram socket.
The socket is behind a firewall directory that is
mode 770, so that only members of the news
administration group can send messages to it. It is a
very small program that parses the first parameter in
its command line and converts it to an internal com-
mand identifier. This identifier and the remaining
parameters are sent to innd which processes the
command, and sends back a formatted reply. For
example, the following commands stops the server
from accepting any new connections, adds a news-
group, and then tells it to recompute the list of hosts
that are authorized newsfeeds:

 ctlinnd pause "Clearing out log files" 
 ctlinnd newgroup comp.sources.unix m vixie@pa.dec.com 
 ctlinnd reload newsfeeds "Added OSF feed" 
 ctlinnd go "" 
 

The most commonly -used ctlinnd command is
``flush.'' This directs the server to close the
batchfile that is open for a site, and is typically used
as follows:

 mv batchfile batchfile.work 
 ctlinnd flush sitename 
 innxmit sitename batchfile.work