nntp-extensions Re: Multicasting news

[Mark Turner]

Brian Kantor <brian at nothing.ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> I think multicasting as a way to distribute news is a damn good idea, if
> we can figure out how to do it.  Fills, FEC, and other techniques could
> be used to ensure that some large percentage of the news is distributed
> as first-effort broadcast, with traditional NNTP filling in the holes.

I currently have most of the news servers at PIPEX receiving more than
70% of their news via multicast over the PIPEX backbone.  The next
version of the software will cope with much higher percentages.  The
same technology will be used by our recently announced satellite news
service.  In both cases standard NNTP feeds are used to fill in the
holes.

We do intend to make the protocol and a sample implementation available
once the service is fully tested and has gone live.

Whilst my work was done from scratch I did go visit the folks at UUNet
and have incorporated some ideas that came out of their experiments with
MUSE.

Cheers,

Mark.