Subject: Re: NNCP Services

From: John Goerzen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2021 23:03:45 -0500

On Fri, Oct 08 2021, Koushik Roy wrote:

> Hey,
>
> I've been playing around with NNCP and really love what I'm 
> finding so
> far. I've built a whole bunch of stuff on NNCP so far, including
> a youtube-dl based video downloader and a Telegram bot that lets 
> me
> send/receive messages through NNCP. (The latter bot was 
> something I
> cooked up for use on a trip where I was going to have low 
> connectivity
> and it worked really well.) I also use NNCP as a way to access 
> services

That is a really neat idea!  Do you happen to have the source code 
for that available somewhere that the rest of us might try it out 
too?

> and commands on my LAN at home, which I expose through a relay 
> node with
> an external static IPv4 IP. I was wondering if others had built 
> any
> services on NNCP and if so what other folks been doing and what 
> patterns
> they've been using?

I've built an apt-offline processor, which is used to install or 
upgrade Debian/ubuntu systems.

On the Internet-connected box, I have an exec:

        apt-offline: ["/usr/local/bin/apt-offline-proc"]

The script can just run apt-offline get $INPUTFILE --bundle 
$OUTPUTFILE
then use nncp-file to send the OUTPUTFILE to $NNCP_SENDER

I also have scripts for receiving zfs or dar backups, and for 
distributed syncing of git repos.  See 
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp for details.

I also run Usenet over NNCP, and offer NNCP Usenet feeds to 
interested people.

> capture those crashes again so I can post this on the list. 
> Anyway
> that's all and sorry for getting a bit stream-of-consciousness.

It's all good, and welcome.

- John