Intel 1520 User Manual

Appendix A Caching Solutions and Performance

The appliance as a news server

As a news server, the Intel NetStructure Cache Appliance does the following:

✔ Maintains lists of supported news groups

✔ Accepts news feeds for each supported news group

✔ Serves requested articles to users

✔ Accepts and numbers user postings to the supported news groups

The appliance as a caching proxy news server

As a caching proxy news server for a particular news server, the Intel 
NetStructure Cache Appliance does the following:

✔ Maintains lists of the news groups on its parent NNTP servers. You can 

configure the frequency that the appliance updates its copies of group lists. 

✔ Caches and serves article overview lists on demand. You can also tell the 

appliance to pull article overview lists from the parent news server 
periodically. 

✔ Caches and serves articles on demand. The appliance can also accept news 

feeds, like any news server. 

✔ Caches and serves miscellaneous LIST files, such as subscription files.

✔ Sends user postings to the parent news server.

When clients issue news requests, the appliance intercepts these requests and 
serves them from its cache, reducing traffic to parent news servers. If a particular 
overview or article is not in the cache, the appliance forwards requests to the 
parent server. 

Supporting several parent news servers

The Intel NetStructure Cache Appliance can cache articles for several news 
servers. You specify the parent news servers for the appliance from the command-
line interface (see Configuring NNTP servers‚ on page 65). For each parent news 
server, the appliance can cache some or all of that server’s news groups.