Re: [44net] The 44net mailing list is moving to a new host - 44net

21 Sep 2017

...
  It's a single mbox format file that is broken up
into individual messages
 which are stored in directories by date.  A script to feed them into an
 NNTP posting program.  There are currently over 10,000 such messages. 
Well OK, it is not the kind of data volume that you could not afford to store in two
different native formats.
(given today's size of disk drives etc)

...
  There are difficulties. 
...
  The Mailman authentication data is stored as a Python
'pickle' (compressed
 dictionary file).  There is a program to export a list of users, but
 it does not permit querying a single specific user, nor does it export
 passwords. 
...
  NNTP has a Perl hook for authentication.  Someone
would have to write a
 Python program that could extract the necessary per-user data from the
 Python dictionary, and be called from the Perl NNTP authenticator. 
Again a case where it would be so convenient to have a central store of authentication
info that
could be queries by many different services...
E.g. when one of the APIs would be LDAP (as someone already suggested), it would be
really
simple to write a Perl hook that does an LDAP query.

...
  Across the Atlantic.  The NNTP server is in England,
the Mailman mailing
 list is in San Diego. 
My suggestion was to run INN on the gw server that now runs mailman, and keep it local.
You could run a couple of servers around the world, but of course each of them would
be facing the authentication issue.  There should not be yet another "register here
for access" thing.

Rob