Re: Offline mail and group cooperation

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On Sun, 06 Oct 2002, Kai Großjohann wrote:
> grossjoh@lothlorien.cs.uni-dortmund.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:
> 
>> Another alternative might be to install a news server for our group,
>> and everybody installs leafnode on their laptop.
> 
> I wonder how come that nobody commented on this alternative?

...because I didn't feel that I had very much to contribute. :)

> Is anyone out there using this?  

Not in exactly the situation you talk about, but for similar things,
yes.

> How does it work? Does anyone have experience with this versus doing
> the shared folder thing via IMAP?

It works well, though leafnode tends to slow down as the local cache
size grows, because it simply dumps all articles for a single group in
the one directory. Thus, performance is directly related to the (usually
poor) filesystem directory search implementation.

> It would also be interesting to hear from people using an NNTP for
> group-local communication, without that extra offline stuff. 

It's certainly very usable for this, what with being a many-to-many
communications medium. It tends to have better tools available for using
it than Shared IMAP, simply because it's been doing it longer.

> Maybe I can learn from it whether it is time-intensive to maintain
> your own NNTP server installation, 

AFAIK, no, for a local server only. If you actually want to do news
peering and exchange with other news servers (not including
leafnode-style caching servers) then it's more involved.

OTOH I run a cache-only server myself, so I may not have the full
picture in my head.

        Daniel

-- 
Reality is not as strong as perception. Perception all too often swallows
reality and spits it out in a new, unrecognizable form.
        -- Maytee Aspuro