This code was originally authored by Dimitre Liotev dl@liotev.com and released under the terms of the General Public License. I acquired it by downloading the tarball to be found here: http://znain.net/cl-nntp/ .. I've placed it on github with an eye to extension, but also for greater convenience.
-- Brian O'Reilly, January 25, 2013.
This is a NNTP client library. The current implementation is not complete, posting is not implemented yet.
To load the system:
(asdf:load-system "cl-nntp")
Note that the name of the ASDF system is cl-nttp, but the lisp
package is com.liotev.nntp, with cl-nntp and nntp specified
as its nicknames.
news.eternal-september.org is a free news server, but requires registration. Here is an example of using some of the functions:
;; Connect to an nntp server
(cl-nntp:connect "news.eternal-september.org" 119)
;; Select a group
(cl-nntp:group "comp.lang.lisp")
;; Fetch the current article
(cl-nntp:article)
The last server you connect to is the default server. If you connect to port 563 or 443, a TLS(SSL) connection will be used. If you want to use TLS with other ports you have to send the key parameter :use-tls to the cl-nntp:connect function. (Note that STARTTLS is not implemented yet but will be in the near future.)
If the server requires authorization the use name and password will be searched in the user's .authinfo file, whose location you can specify by setting variable authinfo-file-name. There user name and password for the nntp server should be specified in the .authinfo file like this:
machine server-name login user-name password pass-word
For example if the server name is nntp.giganews.com, the use name is xxxer and the password is zzz555 the line would look like this:
machine nntp.giganews.com login xxxer password zzz555
If a authentication through the authinfo file does not succeed, the user will be asked to supply user name and password.
NNTP is a protocol for reading and posting Usenet articles [1]. It is described in several RFC's:
-
RFC 6048 - Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) Additions to LIST Command
-
RFC 4643 - Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) - Extension for Authentication
-
RFC 4642 - Using Transport Layer Security (TLS) with Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
-
RFC 3977 - Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
-
RFC 2980 - Common NNTP Extensions