:''Alternate use: International Nonproprietary Name''
INN (InterNetNews) is a Usenetnews server package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991 and presented at the Summer 1992USENIX conference in San Antonio, Texas. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP functionality.
While previous servers processed articles individually or in batches, ''innd'' is a single continuously running process that receives articles from the network, files them, and records what remote hosts should receive them. Readers can access articles directly from the disk in the same manner as B News and C News, but an included program called ''nnrpd'' also serves newsreaders that employ NNTP.
A later improvement was the Cyclical News Filesystem (CNFS) which sequentially stores articles in large on-disk buffers. This method, implemented by Scott Fritchie, greatly increased performance by eliminating the operating system overhead needed to deal with thousands of individual article files.
James Brister's ''innfeed'' program was also added to the package. Like ''innd'', ''innfeed'' operates continuously to feed articles out to other servers, while the earlier ''innxmit'' processed them in batches. This combination allows articles to be received and redistributed with virtually no latency, and has substantially changed the nature of Usenet interaction by reducing the time for messages to be posted, read across the network and answered from hours or days to seconds or minutes. A similar earlier program called ''nntplink'' provided a comparable function, but it was produced independently.
INN is As of 2005 under active development. The package is maintained by volunteers, and development is hosted by the Internet Systems Consortium.
==External links==
* Rich Salz (1992). [ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/extra-docs/innusenix.pdf InterNetNews: Usenet transport for Internet sites.]''
* [http://www.isc.org/sw/inn/ Home page for INN]
Usenet
Inn
:''For the river named Inn, see Inn River''.
Inns are establishments where travellers can procure food, drink, and lodging. Found in Europe, they first sprang up when the Ancient Rome built their famous system of highways two millennia ago. Some inns in Europe are century old. In addition to providing for the needs of travellers, inns traditionally acted as community gathering places.
In today's automobile-ridden world, real inns are fast dying out. The few that are left function primarily as pubs. In North America, inns are usually alcohol-serving restaurants that have never provided lodging or serviced the needs of travellers. In Europe, it is the provision of accommodation, if anything, that now differentiates inns from taverns, alehouses and pubs. These later tended only to supply alcohol (although in the United Kingdom the conditions of their licence sometimes required them to have a nominal supply of food and soft drinks). Inns tend to be grander and more long-lived establishments. Famous London examples include the George and the Tabard. There is however no formal distinction between an inn and other kinds of establishment, and many pubs will use the name "inn", either simply because they are long established, or to summon up a particular kind of image.
The original functions of an inn are now usually split among separate establishments, such as hotels, lodges, motels, pubs, restaurants, and taverns. In North America, the lodging aspect of the word "inn" lives on in hotel brand names like Holiday Inn, and in some state laws that refer to lodging operators as innkeepers.
The German words for "inn", "innkeeper", and "inkeeping" illustrate the historical importance of inns. An innkeeper is Wirt (a host), the inn itself is a Wirtshaus (a host's house), and innkeeping is Wirtschaft. The last word literally means hosting or hospitality, but is also used to mean economics and business in general. In the Greek language, the word for economy (''oikos'' "house" + ''nomos'' "law") is actually identical to house-keeping.
The Inns of Court were originally ordinary inns where lawyers met to do business, but have become institutions of the legal profession in London.
:''See Also:'' Public house, Caravanserai, List of lodging typesDrinking establishments