NNTP Protocol: What is the Network News Transport Protocol and what is it for?

Network News Transport Protocol or also known as NNTP, it is a protocol that has been created mainly for what it is reading and posting news articles on the Usenet (User Network). It has the function of being able to push the news articles between the servers.

NNTP started working from March 1986where it was created by Brian Kantor and Phil Lapsley in collaboration with Stan Barber and Erik Fair. And it was until 2006 when they made improvements to this protocol including new tools in its operation.

Therefore, in this post we are going to explain a little more about what the protocol for network news transfersas well as its main operation.

What is NNTP and what is its role in a computer network?

The NNTPis he news transfer protocol which is mainly used by the network “Usenet Internet Service”, which is based on strings of text sent over 7-bit ASCII TCP channels. It is mainly used to be able to upload, download and transfer the different news articles between the servers.

In the same way, all this was created to give the opportunity to users who store new articles on a server with a central databaseallowing visitors to selections only the item they want to read.

The operation of this tool is very simple, it has a server where it is hosted all news articlesand to him they connect clients over the network. That is, it establishes a connection between server and client. What it allows to achieve a very low number of duplicate articles.

All this becomes an advantage for the news service, avoiding the existence of duplication of all previous news. All this connection that is established is executed through the tcp-protocol, where port 119 is reserved for NNTP. But there are some exemptions, and that is when the client connects to the server using the SSL used is port 563.

It is important to mention that each of the articles saved on the server is referenced with the hostname of the client that published it. This reference is found in the field called nntp-posting-host.

How does the network news transport protocol work?

This protocol uses two methods to be able to transfer the news in network, for this use the passive and active method, which we show you below:

Pushing Method (Active)

This first method consists in the client sends item to serverthis returns a response code which will let you know that you already have such text, something like the famous delivery messages. All this is done under the command of IHAVE msgid. A method also known as Push.

However, this method has disadvantage, and it is that the text is searched individually, This forces there to be a large number of database accesses and one heavy load for the serverwhich can cause delays or delays in its operation.

Pulling method (Passive)

In this case it is about being able to obtain a list with a certain number of items whose date is later than the one previously specified by the client. All this works under the order NEWS NEWS.

Once the list has been displayed, the client should only select those that do not have from the list to be transferred. This whole technique is also known as throw. This whole process is constantly regulated by a strict control by the server, considering that you can confidential information exists and that can be seen by other clients.

What are the benefits of the NNTP protocol in a computer network?

Every protocol is created and launched to the market with the aim of offering you a ease to its usersin this case NNTP takes care of which is the transfer of articles and thus make this process easier for customers.

Therefore, here we present the main benefits of using this tool in computer networks:

• Clients have the opportunity to list available newsgroups for them to be downloaded and sent through the servers.
• NNTP allows publish articles by specific orders on the servers.
• Every time a text is published, it is being creating a new articletherefore, the only information that will appear will be the message header. While at the time of send a text it is about one that is already created and exists, therefore, complete information about it will appear in the header. All this offers an indicator to know when it was posted the message.
• Both readers and transfer customers they can perform the text downloads.
• allows a simultaneous client access to a single news or to several.

What other protocols for transporting news networks exist and how do they differ from this one?

The Internet has become one of the largest entities in the world and at the same time something very complex. This is how there are many specialized network transport protocols and that daily work in order to improve and facilitate the experiences of each of the users.

Because of this, here we show you other protocols specialized in network transport:

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HTTP is currently one of the most popular and used on the Internethe himself handles the transfer of web pages that are sent through browsers. This is how this protocol is responsible for handling a large number of pages such as the World Wide Web (www).

Thanks to World Wide Web, the HTTP protocol has become one of the most popular networksince today there are millions of www pages. They add it daily.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

Usually everyone the e-mails that are sent and received from the Internet have to go from one server to another, they do this thanks to a single electronic exchange protocolwhich is known as SMTP. He himself takes care of boost message delivery to each of your customers, using the most popular emails such as Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlookamong others.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

As we already know, most of the web pages in the world use the HTTP protocol. Without However, there is a very high probability that many of them made their way to servers where different protocols resideas is that of FTP file transferthis being the main protocol for the transfer of entire files from one computer to another over an internet network.

It is also important to mention that FTP has a variant which is sftp, this allows the transfer of confidential files through a secure environment, preventing these from ending up in the hands of the wrong customers.