Peer

Peer is a perl script and two modules that allow news articles to be fed from a remote server to another server. It requires only the perl module Net::NNTP, which is part of the libnet package available for your favourite CPAN mirror, and needs no special permission or access to innd's history file to run.

One module (NNTPPeer.pm) implements a subset of the commands given in the draft-barber-nntp-imp-07 which defines an extension of rfc 977. Specifically it implements the TAKETHIS and CHECK commands of streaming mode. This module may be of use in other applications.

The other module (PeerTransfer.pm) is the meat of the program; essentially only two routines are called in the actual script which respectively initiate and actually do the transfer of articles.

Features

• Totally independent of the news server. It needs to know nothing about the article spool area, active file or history; in fact it doesn't need to even to run on the same machine as the news server.
• Needs no special privileges to run.
• Multiple article streams can be used for a very fast (for something written perl) transfer rate. It should certainly be faster than suck when using kill files.
• Kill files may be specified as a series of call backs, one for each newsgroup to which the article was posted, to perl functions which return a string if the article is killed; 0 otherwise.
• Standard newsrc file (called status.conf in the default implementation) compatible with suck's.
• Logging is possible via syslog.
• Can collect via newnews or Xref
• Written in perl so it should be eminently hackable.

At present this should be regarded as beta quality software; however I've been using it for a few months with no obvious problems. As ever your mileage may vary. Unless you're at least reasonably happy with perl this probably isn't for you because I haven't made it particularly user friendly - you will have to edit the base perl script to get it to work for you. I hope I've commented it enough that this won't be too unobvious.

I am interested in feature requests and bug reports for this - but don't hold your breath waiting for them to materialise; I do have other things to do....

History

24th October 1998

Initial release

15th November 1998

Some rewriting:

• Kill files now use callbacks to arbitrary perl functions in the main script
• Fixed a few disasters waiting to happen, mostly to do with how well it would recover if the article stream got interrupted - should now be very robust

28th November 1998

Few more improvements

• All headers are converted to lower case when passed to the kill callbacks
• Can now collect article id's by newnews
• You can now log a reason when you kill an article
• Some documentation has been written

31st January 1999

Some fine tuning

• Speeded up collection by Xref. It should now be as fast as NEWNEWS
• This is now sufficiently stable that it has moved to beta software

Real Soon Now^tm

Support for username, password when logging onto the remote newsserver. It might even get more friendly in the future.

Download

Unless you place the two modules it needs in perl's default search path, you should always invoke it in the installation directory so it can find its modules, or modify @INC appropriately. Enjoy!

Peer Mailing List

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