Supporting Messaging Clients

Understanding Newsfeeds

Newsfeeds enable users of different news sites to read and post articles to newsgroups as though they are using one news site. An article posted to one news site gets sent to other news sites where it can be read. You need to create a newsfeed to each remote server to which you want to distribute news articles.

You can distribute the newsgroup load among servers using three types of newsfeeds: master, slave, and peer. A server can have both a slave and peer feed. There can be one or more slave feeds, depending on the size of the site.

To ensure that servers are synchronized, use one server, which is referred to as a master, to manage the article numbers and keep all other servers synchronized. The master server sends articles to the other servers, which are referred to as slaves or peers. Clients connect only to the slave or peer servers.

The following are three common newsfeed scenarios: