A simple, standalone NNTP server written in pure Ruby.
niouz is an extremely simple NNTP server implemented in pure Ruby. It does not offer all the features of standard NNTP servers like CNews or INN (most notably, it can’t communicate with other servers, but only with clients), but it is orders of magnitudes simpler to deploy: one Ruby file, no dependencies outside Ruby 1.8, very simple setup.
niouz provides a simple and easy way to quickly set up private newsgroups for a small group of people. It generally does the Simplest Thing That Can Possibly Work, and would probably not scale beyond a few dozen users and a few thousands messages. On the other hand, the resulting code is quite small (about 600 lines including comments), easy to understand and to modify/extend.
It’s been used internally in the research department I worked in for several years, and it seems quite stable (no data loss, no server crash ever) although given the low number of users and messages, it’s difficult to be sure how much load it can handle.
Pierre-Charles David (pcdavid@pcdavid.net)
You can download this project in either zip or tar formats.
You can also clone the project with Git by running:
$ git clone git://github.com/pcdavid/niouz