Begin forwarded message:

Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2021 03:01:06 -0000 (UTC)
From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
Newsgroups: rocksolid.shared.general
Subject: Usenet feeds via NNCP (UUCP successor) available

Hi folks,

If you haven't heard of it, NNCP [1] is to UUCP approximately what ssh
is to rsh/telnet. NNCP is asynchronous, delay-tolerant for
fire-and-forget secure reliable files, file requests, Internet mail
(and now NEWS) and commands transmission. All packets are integrity
checked, end-to-end encrypted, explicitly authenticated by known
participants public keys. Onion encryption is applied to relayed
packets. Each node acts both as a client and server, can use push and
poll behaviour model. NNCP can operate over a lot of transports:
Internet, USB sticks, tapes, CD-ROMs, ssh, Dropbox, etc.

So basically it's UUCP for the modern world. I've used NNCP for
everything from automated git repo synchronization [2] to
hundreds-of-GB ZFS backup streams.

And I now intend to offer Usenet feeds to interested people that would
like to receive them over NNCP. The setup is easier than with UUCP,
the environment is more secure, and the approach is so similar that it
needs only a tiny bit of glue to drop in to INN in place of UUCP.

Over at
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/usenet.org you
can find my instructions on doing this. It contains instructions both
for communicating with news.quux.org over NNCP (including prerequisites
and expectations) as well as some background on setting up NNCP for
standalone INN-based non-public networks.

It is also a sort of brief-ish tutorial on the minimum setup necessary
to get INN working with NNCP in this way. It could also, by extension,
be somewhat of a starting point for the INN side of things for those
wishing to use UUCP as well. The primary difference is using nncp-exec
instead of uux, and there is a small shell wrapper to pretend to be uux
and transform the uux invocation into an nncp-exec one. No INN
patching is necessary.

For those interested, NNCP's integration page [3] discusses how to
integrate it with Postfix or Exim (agin using UUCP-like techniques),
BitTorrent, etc. Over at my nncp-tools page [4] I have information on
the NNCP public relay I operate, tunneling NNCP over other transports,
and so forth.

I would welcome any corrections, contributions, feedback, etc. on any
of this.

Thanks,

John

[1] http://www.nncpgo.org/ or https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/

[2]
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10274-distributed-asynchronous-git-syncing-with-nncp

[3] https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Integration.html

[4] https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools

Hi,

thanks for posting the link. This NNCP looks very interesting, and I had not come across it before.
Seems like it opens huge possibilities for distributed stuff in general.
Mind you, I'm not involved in any development for news-based stuff (NNTP) or rocksolid.

I guess if I would write a federated forum from scratch, I would base it on a different protocol, probably git (https://salsa.debian.org/jgoerzen/gitsync-nncp), or maybe even rsync for smaller stuff.

cheers

--
Posted on RetroBBS