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Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0 includes a news server based on the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). The Microsoft NNTP Service lets you add a news server to IIS so users can access newsgroups through a local intranet or the Internet. NNTP newsgroups are a great resource for promoting internal and external collaboration. For example, Microsoft uses newsgroups as forums to disseminate Web-based technical information and support to external end users and internal corporate users. Many companies use internal newsgroups to share information with their clients.

The NNTP Service is based on the standard NNTP pro-tocol for client-to-server and server-to-server communications. The NNTP Service supports MIME for mail messages, HTML for tradi- tional HTML documents, and Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and JPEG for graphics.

In this article, I'll describe how you can configure the NNTP Service, set up your own newsgroups, and secure those newsgroups. To illustrate this discussion, I'll show you how to create a customized Help desk newsgroup that your internal users can access to publish and obtain support information.

Installing and Managing the NNTP Service
To install the NNTP Service, you select the Internet NNTP Service option, as you see in Screen 1, page 196, during the IIS setup process. (To install the NNTP Service after you set up IIS 4.0, select the Add/Remove Programs applet in Control Panel, select the Internet NNTP Service option, and complete the setup process.) The IIS setup program will ask you to provide an install directory for the NNTP Service (the default directory is \inetpub\nntpfile). After the IIS installation completes, you must reboot the server. The default NNTP Service setup consumes about 3.4MB of hard disk space; however, this amount will increase, depending on how often you use the NNTP Service.

After you install the NNTP Service, you can manage it with the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) version of Internet Service Manager (ISM) or the HTML version of ISM. The MMC version provides more options than the HTML version and executes faster, because it runs on the LAN. The HTML version is handy for administering IIS and the NNTP Service from the Internet or from a non-Win32 system. Together, these tools let you administer your news server from your LAN or anywhere where you can access the Internet.

When you install the NNTP Service, the installer adds new counters to Windows NT's Performance Monitor that you can monitor with other NT system and application counters: The NNTP Commands object provides counters for client activities on the server, and the NNTP Server object provides counters for server activities. You use these two objects with other Performance Monitor objects to track the overall performance of your server and the detailed performance of the NNTP Service. The IIS documentation provides initial tips on what counters you will want to monitor. In addition to including the NNTP Service-specific counters, the NNTP Service writes special status and error messages to the NT event log that you can monitor with Event Viewer, Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) applications, and the Dump Event Log (dumpel.exe) utility that comes with Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit.

Screen 2, page 196, shows the MMC version of the ISM with the Default NNTP Site expanded. Column heads in the right pane of the MMC show how you can track the current users accessing the news server, where they came from, and when they logged on. Screen 2 shows one user connected. You can see from the icon in the first column under User that the user is a client. The second column shows the user's IP address (hidden in Screen 2), and the last column shows the time the user connected.

You can terminate a particular user from the Default NNTP Site by right-clicking the user entry and selecting Terminate. You can also terminate all users by right-clicking any user and selecting Terminate All.

Creating a Newsgroup
Once your news server is running, you can create newsgroups, such as a Help desk newsgroup that you can use to help your users find answers to their computer-related problems. First, select and right-click the Default NNTP Site in the MMC to display its properties. Next, click the Groups tab to display the currently defined newsgroups and options. Click Create new newsgroup to display the Newsgroup Properties dialog box.

At this point, you can create the newsgroup and set certain properties. Screen 3 shows the options I used for an example Help desk newsgroup. You enter the name for your newsgroup in the Newsgroup property field; this name corresponds to the name of the directory that will hold the newsgroup files. The newsgroup name can't contain spaces but can contain underscores. I didn't test for all valid characters, but the newsgroup can't use characters that your file system doesn't support. I installed the newsgroup on an NTFS volume, which supports long filenames.

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