Network Devices

The News Transport Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (net news) between news server and for reading and posting articles by end client application.

Usenet was originally designed based on the UUCP network, with most article transfer taking place over direct point to point telephone link between news sever and which were powerful time sharing systems. Readers and posters logged into this computer reading the article directly from the local disc.

As local area network and internet participation it became describe to allow news readers to be run on personal computers connected to local networks. Because distributed files system were not yet widely available, a news protocol was developed based on the client server model. It resembled the simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), but was tailored for exchanging news group article.

A news reader, also known as a news client, is a software application that reads article on Usenet, either directly from the news server's disks or via the NNTP. The well-known TCP port 119 is reserved for NNTP. When client connect to a news server with transport layer security (TLS), TCP port 563 is used. This is sometimes referred to as NNTPS.

In October 2006, the IETF released RFC 3977 which updates the NNTP protocol and codifies many of the additions over the years since RFC977.