Subject: Re: A Public NNCP relay

From: Sergey Matveev <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2021 11:57:34 +0300

Greetings!

*** John Goerzen [2021-07-28 19:41]:
>I am contemplating setting up an experimental public NNCP relay for people.
>I would like to hear thoughts on this: would anyone be interested, what do
>you think of the plan, etc.
>Thoughts?

Personally I have no strong opinion about all of that. I assume that all
NNCP users are rather advanced users and all of them have either their
own home server, or VPS or something similar. So hardly can imagine if
public relay would be really useful. But that are only thoughts, no any
confidence in them :-).

Possibly we can use it (also) for sharing of something useful among all
of few NNCP users. But... I do not know what exactly could it be. New
NNCP release tarballs through multicast area? Some kind of
chat/maillist/echo conference -- but there is already that maillist
exists and we have to determine format of the messages and exec-commands
for that tasks (for example simple recfile-formatted UTF-8 plaintext
message with From/Date/Subject lines and exec-command accepting it
through stdin). It is solvable and interesting task of course, but I am
fear that it could lead to creation of yet another class of messaging
system :-)

But anyway I would be glad to help somehow with all of that. I can also
provide my resources two: 100Mbps connection to home server with several
hundred of gigabytes of free diskspace.

>I could set up nncp-daemon and nncp-toss and use ZFS "project" quotas to
>limit the size of each spool directory to something reasonable.

I also use ZFS quotas at home for preventing accidental running out of
disk space :-)

>I wonder if there is a way to queue up an outbound packet that says
>"send via one of these lists of paths and delete the others once it's
>sent?")

At first sight I do not like idea to remove others, possible duplicate,
packets, because there are no delivery guarantees of the first one. I
think it is better to have excess packets, possibly leading to more
transferred traffic, but with higher probability of guaranteed delivery.

>One could also route NNCP messages over UUCP.  But then.... why?

Unrelated remark, but that week I successfully transferred hundreds of
packets for several days through the serial COM-port with NNCP, by
running relatively easy setup PPP with link-local IPv6 addresses (no IP
configuration was necessary) and multicast nodes discovery. Writing of
sliding-window protocol with *efficient* guaranteed data delivery is not
trivial task and it is easier to setup PPP+TCP (that are still available
out of box in most BSD systems I believe), that will also work good with
the modems, not only null-modem connection.

-- 
Sergey Matveev (http://www.stargrave.org/)
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