(My apologies for following up on myself.) Someone suggested in private email that I should provide a full reference for the prior art on USENET/IP-Multicast back to the NANOG list. Here it is. However, this thread probably should migrate to some other (more appropriate) place like the mboned list and off of NANOG... Ran rja@home.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Author: Kurt J. Lidl Author: Josh Osborne Author: Joe Malcolm Title: Drinking from the Firehose: Multicast USENET News Pages: 33-45 Publisher: USENIX Proceedings: USENIX Conference Proceedings Date: Winter 1994 Location: San Francisco, CA Institution: UUNET Technologies, Inc. Abstract: News transport and spooling systems of the last several years have concentrated on decreasing the resource load on news servers. One beneficial side effect has been the average decrease in time that a news system spends on a given article. This paper describes a novel USENET news transport protocol, which we call Muse. The two major motivations behind Muse are to reduce the average propagation delays of articles on USENET and to further reduce the resource load on a centralized news server. Muse runs on top of the experimental Internet multicast backbone, commonly referred to as the Mbone. Major design and implementation issues are discussed. Security concerns of multicast news are discussed and our solution is examined. The problems of scaling news distribution to thousands of hosts are also addressed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------