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Easy installation and Management GUI
DNews News Server includes an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) for Windows, which makes setting up and managing the server very easy, even if you have little or no current knowledge of Internet News. Even without the GUI, DNews News Server set up and management is simple. Click here for more details
DNews allows you to manage your server remotely from any web browser, Click here for details
Performance - Receiving News Feed - Full Feeds
The specially designed database allows DNews to easily take a full feed even on relatively limited hardware. Several customers have reported a jump by a factor of up to 3 times when upgrading to DNews from other software, but this will depend very much on what bottleneck was limiting your system previously.
Click here for technical information on incoming feeds.
Performance - Receiving News Feed - Dynamic Pull Feeds
This unique feature allows the DNews News Server to dynamically and automatically only pull news groups which are actually read on your server. This unique advance can result in enormous savings in disk space and bandwidth while further enhancing performance. This dynamic sucking feed is particularly helpful for small sites and workgroups, allowing a group of one hundred users to be supported on as little as 100-200 MB while retaining all the advantages of a full feed. Single-user feeds can use as little as 5 MB.
The Dynamic Pull (sucking) feed is unique to the DNews server and is designed to provide a better solution for the large number of smaller sites and companies that want the benefits of running a local news server and a 'full feed', but have limited resources. The dynamic sucking feed option allows DNews News Server to dynamically and automatically only suck news groups which are actually read on your server, while allowing users all the choice provided with a full-feed within the organization's policy.
The dynamic feed option is generally a far more efficient alternative for servers with 500 users or less. Often the employment of the Dynamic sucking feed can avoid the need to invest in a faster more expensive line, additional and hardware and memory that would otherwise be necessary to use a full feed.
DNews currently allows up to twenty separate dynamic feeds to be set up. Both suck and full feeds can be set up together if desired. DNews can pull using as many channels to each upstream server as you want all simultaneously.
Click here for technical information on incoming feeds.
Performance - Sending News Feeds - Full Feeds
DNews includes a module called 'DFEED' which is designed for sending out multiple full news feeds extremely efficiently. On a typical system DFeed can easily send out as much data as your network cards will allow it to send.
DFEED's unique design is superior to most other feeding systems, typical news feeds tend to suffer from 'part loss' this occurs when the receiving end cannot keep up with the sending system, messages which can't be sent immediately are stored and in theory sent later, but often they are deleted before they are sent or cannot be sent on fast enough as they are 'spread' all over the disk it is much slower to find and send these items than the incoming feed. As a result most news feeds tend to drop a small percent of news items, say one in 10, when this happens in text news groups no one notices, but when it happens in a binary news group the result is disasterous as the binary pictures are sent as multiple part messages, loosing every 10th message means the other 9 parts are also 'useless'.
DFeed solves this problem by separating the incoming and outgoing feeds via a disk 'pipe' which just happens to be very simple because of the bucket based storage system DNews uses. As a result the disk is being read 'sequentially' which is about 10 times more efficient than trying to find items 'all over the disk'. This means if the feed does get behind a bit it will be able to catch up again when the desitination server 'speeds up'. And if it never does and DFeed 'really' has to drop some messages, it drops them in a block, so individual 'parts' are not lost but entire multipart items so the total loss is much less.
In addition DFeed feeds are incredibly easy to configure, you just add the name of the destination into the feed file, you can also specify many options if you want but the basic configuration is trivial.
Delayed - Feeds, dfeeds also support delayed feeds, this is an efficient way of sending a 'backup' feed to another site, where you want to fill in the gaps in their other feed but you don't want to use all your bandwidth sending articles that they would also get from another feed, you can specify a delay of 'n' seconds (e.g. 60) then your feed will only have to 'send' articles that the destination has missed from it's 'main' feed. This is also ideal for use where 'satellite' feeds are used.
Click for technical information on feeding news to other servers
The System is designed to be run unattended
DNews was designed to run unattended with virtually no ongoing management time. This is achieved through various intelligent and intuitive features that can be set by the system administrator. The cyclic expiration system means disk space never runs out even if news volumes double over the weekend when no one is available to fix things.
The Server remains stable even where problems with downstream feeds arise - detecting and dealing with the consequences of these problems automatically.
DNews emails a daily report to the administrator detailing what’s been received from and sent to each feed, how the expire ran, disk space used and available so if something does go wrong the manager is informed, if disk space becomes critical an email is sent immediately.
Where the dynamic feed is used the server dynamically reflects the changing reading habits of users without any manual intervention.
Upgrades are always 'easy' typically it takes less than 2 minutes to upgrade to a newer version of DNews, in most cases it's even possible to downgrade and in NO cases are limitations on platform versions un-necessarily added, so you don't need to apply service pack 'x' etc just to upgrade DNEWS.
DNews works well with a tiny spool of 10mb or a huge spool of 500 Gig or more. Disks can be added at any time without having to calculate which part of the news tree to place on which disk.
DNews will support 1-20,000 concurrent users on a single machine the RAM usage per user is very low. One hundred connections would be possible on a machine with 96MB of RAM, and 300 connections on 128 MB of RAM. This incredible range of performance means you don't have to 'panic' and add extra servers as your user base grows.
(Note: for more than 1000 concurrent users you must use an operating system that supports large numbers of SOCKETS, we recommend NT and Solaris, other unix platforms may work if you make kernel config changes to increase the handle limits)
Click here for large system sizing and tuning information
DNews provides Flexible Access Restrictions plus advanced security features: Reading and Posting Access can be given separately to different users and selections of news groups. For NT and Unix users, DNews allows authorization via the system user database or via an external script or DLL or via your POP server or via PAM, Radius, LDAP etc.... See this page for details
DNews provides two types of connection limiting; you can limit the number of users connecting from a specific sub net, or the number of concurrent users connecting from a specific ip number, within a sub net.
DNewsWeb Supports the standard SSL employed by secure web servers. This allows you to create secure News/discussion groups utilizing the standard security and access controls you employ with your secure web server.
Click here for technical details on access options
Email confirmation of posts
DNews News Server can be configured to send email confirmation to a user as it sends a posted item up to a main news server. This gives users a clear record of a posted item and its successful transfer onto the Internet.
With your own news server, you can have complete control over your own 'local' news groups. This includes normal and moderated news groups.
DNews gives very high performance. This is due to the advanced database which was specifically designed for news item storage. Several advanced techniques are used so that both the speed of accepting incoming news is incredible (tests have gone up to 200 items per second, 20 times a full news feed) and the speed of 'reading' news is also unbeatable, DNews 'arranges' the data on disk for high speed access depending on various tuning parameters, this can make news retrieval faster than any other news server and also increase the life of disks and allow more concurrent users on the same hardware. Click here for large system sizing and tuning information
NNTP streaming extensions are built in. This can double or triple large feed throughput particularly over slow links.
News items are not stored in individual files
Items are stored in a database. This has several advantages over previous systems which add to performance:
Configurable without recompiling
DNews News Server can be configured without recompiling and all the configuration scripts have been simplified wherever possible.
Binaries available, you don't have to build it yourself
As DNews comes pre-compiled you don't have to worry about building it yourself for any platform - we've already done it.
If you are worried about the power hackers may have on your news server (and you should be) then you definitely need this feature which allows you to be sure no unauthorized person is creating or deleting news groups on your system. Click here for technical details.
DNews News Server is compatible with existing standard protocols, to ensure the widest possible range of communications and collaboration. It uses the standard Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) and runs on any TCP/IP network. As a result DNews News Server integrates with the USENET news groups and is inter-operable with any NNTP based newsreader. DNews News Server also supports the use of standard MIME types and image formats, including GIF and JPEG.
Because DNews News Server allows attaching of documents in a variety of multimedia formats, discussion groups have enormous options as vehicles for distribution of information and knowledge. Group members can download documents sent to the group, mark them up, and send them back. The DNewsWeb interface allows attachments to be posted, viewed or saved via the web as well
DNews provides leading edge detection and filtering options to protect your server, users and the wider USENET community from "SPAM".
DNewsWeb - News to Web Gateway and Full Text Searching: DNewsWeb is a news to web gateway provided with the DNews Server. This provides users the additional option of reading and posting news directly from ordinary HTML pages using any browser.
This has several advantages:
| Windows NT 3.51-2000 | Windows 95/98 | Linux |
| MAC OS/X | Solaris | AIX |
| SGI | OS/2 | BSDI |
| SCO | FREEBSD | SunOS |
| OSF | HPUX | Most other unix flavours... |
DNews is commercial software supported and actively developed by NetWin Ltd. This means that if you need assistance at any stage there are experts available to solve any difficulty quickly. In addition there is a mailing list and news group for users to exchange knowledge and experience. DNews includes a comprehensive user manual in HTML format. Because DNews is being commercially developed you can expect to see new features, bug fixes and enhancements at regular intervals. Due to our unique licensing system you can install any new version available up to 12 months after purchasing, and extend this further for a modest fee, this gives you long term insurance that your solution will keep up with the ever changing internet.
Minimum Requirements, for DNews, using the dynamic feed:
8MB RAM, 200MB disk, 3kbps Internet link, 486DX33
Minimum requirements for DNews using a traditional feed:
64MB RAM, 8 Gig SCSI disk, 200kbps Internet link (24 hours a day), Pentium 200,
For detailed system sizing information see this page
Typical Configurations - ranges:
| Description | DNews - Full Feed | DNews (Dynamic Feed) |
|---|---|---|
| RAM | 32-1000MB | 16-256MB |
| DISK | 2-500Gig | 5MB-5Gig |
| Internet Link | 200kbps-1mbps | 1kbps-200kbps |
| Processor | 1 processor 120mhz-4 process 500mhz | 486 10mhz |