Hurricane Electric INN Fire Engine

Description

INN Fire Engine is a news router (or news reflector) designed specifically for use by ISPs that need a high performance low maintenance platform capable of serving 100+ outgoing feeds per server.

The ideal users of INN Fire Engine are transit providers or usenet news resellers.

Availability

The INN Fire Engine is freely available for beta deployment now in binary form from ftp://news.he.net/news-bin.tgz. The source will be available soon.

INN Fire Engine is compiled for Linux 2.0.30. It requires atleast 256 MB of RAM. Absolutely no warranties are included. Use at your own risk. If you are interested in absolutely maximum performance and don't mind a little adjusting then INN Fire Engine may be for you.

Design Guidelines

• Newsfeed support only, no reader support
• Mission critical newsservers have atleast two feeds
• Don't use files (the slowest thing you can do)
• Don't use a ramdisk (this has all the filesystem overhead)
• Don't use mmap (this still involves the filesystem)
• Don't use blocking IPC mechanisms (avoid blocking at all costs)
• Do use shared memory

Features

The INN Fire Engine is composed of two parts. INN Fire Engine, which is based on innd and receives incoming newsfeeds, and Firehose, which is based on innfeed and transmits outgoing newsfeeds.

INN Fire Engine communicates with Firehose via a special nonblocking serialized datagram IPC mechanism implemented using shared memory.

INN Fire Engine Features

• Based on INN
• Familiar newsfeeds and hosts.nntp configuration files
• History file replaced with memory resident historyDB
• Communicates with Firehose via shared memory
• Articles sent from INN to Firehose already in wire format
• No article files
• No active file
• No log file
• No overview files
• No expire necessary
• No mode query
• No mode reader
• No xreplic
• Doesn't process control messages

Firehose Features

• Based on innfeed
• firehose.conf configuration file has familiar innfeed.conf format
• Communicates with INN Fire Engine via shared memory
• Send smallest articles first
• Forget purged articles first
• Purge largest weighted by references
• Doesn't access files
• Doesn't use batches or tapes
• Multi stream feeder

Related Links

• Hurricane Electric R&D: Usenet News
• Internet Software Consortium INN Page

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