Snoozenet
I Post, Therefore I Am
- The Unix Haters Handbook
Snoozenet is a quick and dirty NNTP server, implemented to have as much compatibility with USENET as I could manage without going insane. NNTP is genuinely an awful protocol to implement. If you are looking to implement it, this should give you a pretty good idea how to.
If you are not familiar with USENET, look here first.
Snoozenet currently supports NONE of the server-to-server functions of NNTP. It also has spotty compatibility with clients. It has been tested and works with Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook Express for Windows XP, and Outlook for Windows 98. Apart from those, Snoozenet is untested and might not work. Within the clients tested, most if not all features are fully functional.
Compiling is quick and dirty thanks to maven.
First install openjdk and maven for your respective platform. Nothing more is needed.
To compile, run
$ mvn compile
To package into a JAR file, run
$ mvn package
To run Snoozenet, you can simply run java -jar Snoozenet.jar. Please not that the actual jar file will likely be named different.
Snoozenet does not need a config file to run, however on is provided in the root of this repo as an example. Simply rename it to "config.xml" and have it in the same folder from which you executed Snooznet.jar
For Snoozenet to work, it needs to store its articles (the messages posted by the user) somewhere. The current only backend is called "fs", and stores articles in the .eml format in a file structure. Please make sure to configure this in the config.xml, as the default location for these is the temp folder. Meaning when the server is shut down, all message history is lost.