The third core IIS facility on Windows 2000 Server is the Network News Transfer Protocol Service (NNTP Service). NNTP is the application-layer protocol that underlies the worldwide USENET system of news servers on the Internet. IIS includes an NNTP Service that can be used to create news sites, which are also implemented as virtual servers like Web and FTP sites. Use Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel to install the NTTP Service subcomponent of IIS if you need to.
NNTP Service on IIS 5 fully supports both the client/server and server/server portions of NNTP and can be administered either through the IIS snap-in for the MMC or by a Web browser using NNTP Service Manager (HTML). Like other core IIS facilities, NNTP Service is fully integrated with Windows 2000 event and performance monitoring, and it integrates with the Indexing Service for full-text indexing of newsgroup content.
NNTP Service can be used to implement private news servers for hosting departmental discussion groups within your company or to implement public news servers that provide customer support resources to Internet users. It isn't designed to pull feeds from USENET hosts on the Internet, however. For that purpose, you should obtain Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 and implement the Internet News Service on it to give it NNTP capability. You can use Microsoft Outlook Express to connect to the NTTP Service on an IIS machine in order to download a list of newsgroups, read existing messages, reply to messages, and post new messages.
When you install NNTP Service on IIS, it automatically creates the Default NNTP Virtual Server (Figure 28-21). We'll configure this virtual server in a moment, but first you should know that you can host multiple NNTP virtual servers on a single machine. In this way, several departments in your company can run separate news servers on a single IIS machine, just as they can run separate Web or FTP servers. We'll look at how to do this next and then consider other aspects of managing NNTP virtual servers. Notice that NNTP Service is managed with a combination of Properties windows and wizards, just like the other IIS core services.
Figure 28-21. The IIS console tree showing the Default NNTP Virtual Server on the IIS server ws1.
You can run the following wizards from the IIS console to configure and manage various aspects of NNTP virtual servers:
To create a new NNTP virtual server, just select the server's node in the IIS console tree, click the Action button, point to New, and choose NNTP Virtual Server from the drop-down menu. This starts the New NNTP Virtual Server Wizard, which takes you through the following steps:
The NNTP Service allows you to create virtual directories within your NNTP virtual server. You can use these virtual directories to store portions of the news server's content. To see how this works, follow this procedure to create a new virtual directory within the Default NNTP Virtual Server:
Figure 28-22. Creating a new NNTP virtual directory within the Default NNTP Virtual Server on ws1.
In the New Expiration Policy Wizard, you can create an expiration policy that specifies how long articles will remain in newsgroups before they expire (are deleted). Articles can expire if they surpass a specified age. Follow these steps to create an expiration policy for the scribes.support.* newsgroups:
To add a new newsgroup, select the Newsgroup node in the console tree, click the Action button, point to New, and choose Newsgroup from the dropdown menu. Specify a display name for the new newsgroup and click Next. Or, you can provide a description and prettyname. Click Finish. It's just that simple.
To configure an NNTP virtual server, use the various tabs in its Properties window. For simplicity, we'll continue to use the Default NNTP Virtual Server as our example. You'll notice some similarities between configuring NNTP virtual servers and Web/FTP sites discussed previously. Along the way we'll also create the three scribes.support.* newsgroups mentioned earlier.
Figure 28-23 shows the General tab of the Default NNTP Virtual Server Properties window on the Windows 2000 Server called ws1.scribes.com. On this tab, you can specify the following options:
Figure 28-23. The General tab of the Properties window for the Default NNTP Virtual Server.
Connections and logging on this tab are similar to that for Web and FTP sites discussed earlier in this chapter.You can enable logging here, but you can also enable/disable it on a directory-by-directory basis, just as you can with Web and FTP sites.
The Settings tab contains a variety of settings related to how NNTP functions for the selected virtual server. Specifically, you can set the following options:
To view the list of existing newsgroups on the virtual server, to modify the properties of a group, to create new ones, or to delete existing ones, use the NNTP server's Newsgroups node . Note that a number of default newsgroups already exist within the Default NNTP Virtual Server. Let's create the three newsgroups described earlier. Follow these steps to create the group scribes.support.pc:
Figure 28-24. The New Newsgroup Wizard.
Repeat these steps to create the scribes.support.mac and scribes.support.unix groups. We'll test these groups out in a moment.
TIP
If you have hundreds (or thousands) of newsgroups defined on your virtual server, you can use the Limit Enumeration option on the Newsgroups shortcut menu to locate newsgroups whose properties you want to modify. In the Find Newsgroups dialog box, just specify a portion of the newsgroup name and the maximum number of results you want returned.
On the Security tab you can specify an NNTP operator who can perform limited administrative tasks on the virtual server, just like for Web and FTP sites discussed earlier.
The Access tab allows you to specify which authentication methods can be used when users try to connect to the virtual server. Do this by clicking the Authentication button under Access Control, which opens the Authentication Methods dialog box. These methods are similar to those for Web sites as discussed earlier in this chapter, although the way this dialog box presents them is slightly different.
Connection Control is the same as IP Address And Domain Name Restrictions for Web and FTP sites, discussed earlier. Secure Communication is also similar. Click the Certificate button to start the somewhat misnamed Web Server Certificate Wizard described earlier in this chapter.
Once you've configured your NNTP virtual server properties, you can test it by trying to access your newsgroups using an NNTP client like Outlook Express. Follow these steps:
Figure 28-25. Testing the new newsgroups by posting to them using Outlook Express.
After you make some test postings, switch to the IIS console on your IIS server and select the Current Sessions node under the Default NNTP Virtual Server node in the console tree. This will display information regarding the users who are currently logged on to the virtual server. You can select any user, click Action, and choose either to terminate that user's connection or terminate all connections to the NNTP virtual server.
You can perform one important maintenance task on an NNTP virtual server: rebuilding the indexes and hash tables that the virtual server employs to keep track of the articles that have been posted to it. Circumstances that warrant rebuilding the server are if you manually delete files from the NNTP directories where newsgroup content is stored, experience a disk failure and lost some newsgroup content, or have trouble accessing articles.
To rebuild the Default NNTP Virtual Server, for example, follow these steps: