From: John Cuccia 

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005 06:15:08 -0400, "Geo"  wrote:

>Anyone know what this site is using to find news servers?
>
>http://www.forumcars.com/w3.nls.net.html

The site mentions a "news bot", and I found this.  Don't know if
it is the same one.

http://www.newzbot.com/faq.php#tech
There are 5 primary components:
a database (MySQL), where all the information used by the scanner is stored;
a host gathering process ('host-gather'), which scans Usenet articles for
NNTP servers and enters them in a scanning queue; the scanner itself
('nntp-scan'), a ~1700 line perl script that interrogates a host for NNTP
services and stores the results into a database;
a parallelizing wrapper program ('dnntp-wrapper') that pulls hosts out of
the scanning queue and executes nntp-scan, while ensuring that only one
process works on a host at a time; and a web interface that enables
browsing and searching the database. The idea is that as much is automated
as possible, so I don't have to manually sift through hosts to scan, and
then hand-publish/index the results. Automation r0x.
Every time newzbot does a scan, it collects not only the hosts that are
running public NNTP, but also those that say "I'm not public." It
then take this list and automatically filters those hosts so it doesn't
scan them again. What this means is if newzbot scans your site and you tell
it to go away, it won't come back to visit you for a long, long time
(years..)

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