The NNTP Server is installed using the Windows NT 4 Option Pack. The requirement is the same as IIS. That is Windows NT Server, TCP/IP and NTFS if possible.
You can setup an expiration policy for all newsgroup of a particular newsgroup only. In this policy, you can set up to expire articles according to age (days) or size (MB) or both. If the expiration policy is set to expire articles older than 7 days and size of 500 MB, the articles will expire when either one condition is reached. That is when any articles is more than 7 days old or when the combined size of all articles in the newgroups covered by the policy reached 500 MB. The oldest article will be deleted first.
NNTP news server performance can be improved by moving the newsgroup directories on a RAID 5 array. Any virtual folders needed must be created in a single array.
What is the advantage (or disadvantage) when your home directory is located on a RAID5 disk, multiple virtual directories are created on a single RAID5 disk, or that virtual directories are located among multiple RAID5 disks ? ? ?
>when multiple virtual directories r distributed among RAID5 this will yield faster reading access to the directories
Client newsreader for example MS Outlook Express has a search feature to find the right newgroup from a NNTP server. The NNTP Newsgroups can also be indexed by the Index Server.
Some of your users access via intranet and some through Internet. The external NNTP users have browsers that cannot use Windows NT Challenge/Response. The solutions are either to enable SSL for all clients or let internal users uses Windows NT Domain accounts and external users use SSL. Using SSL is CPU-intensive, therefore I think the later solution is better.