Newsstar

Transfer news between a local NNTP server (INN, sn, s-news)

Newsstar fetches news and posts it to a local server; INN, s-news and sn are supported, and it should be easy to adapt for other servers with some configuration and extra scripts. It’s designed for Unix-like systems, and all the development was done on Linux.

There are already plenty of other programs to do this, but what makes newsstar special is that it can make multiple simultaneous connections, not only to one server, but to several, supporting up to 10 threads. Before fetching each article it checks that it hasn’t already been downloaded by another thread or in a previous session. It can also pipeline article requests to make better use of available bandwidth.

I wrote it because a number of ISPs I have used suffer from unreliable newsfeeds. There is an excellent free server made available by news.individual.net, but it can be a bit slow at times, and using external servers uses more bandwidth. Therefore I wanted a program which could fetch whatever articles my ISP has available, but use the foreign server to avoid missing posts or getting them very late, and to do it as fast as possible.