---

Comparison with existing solutions ¶

Here is comparison with UUCP (Unix to Unix copy), FTN (FidoNet Technology Networks) and SMTP (because it is also store-and-forward solution).

	UUCP	FTN	NNCP	SMTP
Ease of setup	Medium	Hard	Easy	Hard
Mail transmission	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
News transmission	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
File transmission	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Multicast transmission	No	Yes	Yes	No
Chunked files	No	Yes	Yes	No
Remote command execution	Yes	No	Yes	No
Resumable downloads	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Packets prioritizing	Yes	No	Yes	No
Mail compression	No	Yes	Yes	No
SMTP integration	Yes	No	Yes	N/A
Push/poll	Both	Both	Both	Push
DTN	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Intended network size	Dozens	Global	Dozens	Global
Routing	Manual/static	Federated	Manual/static	Federated
PSTN support	Yes	Yes	Possible	No
Anonymous peers	Yes	No	No	Yes
Peers authentication	PAP	PAP/CHAP	public-key	No
Packets encryption	No	No	Yes	No
Metadata privacy	No	No	Yes	No
Packets integrity check	No	No	Yes	No
Sneakernet friendliness	No	Partially	Yes	No

Ease of setup

UUCP can be setup rather easily with few configuration files and few lines in each of them. But you have to add some encryption and authentication overlay for securing you data transmission.

FTN is hard to setup because it is totally different world of software comparing to Unix one. Even mail editor will be something like GoldEd, not an ordinary email client. Moreover, there is no out-of-box encryption and strong authentication involved.

NNCP requires editing of single Hjson configuration file.

File transmission

SMTP could transfer files only Base64-encoding them – this is very inefficient.

Chunked files

FTN software can automatically split huge files on smaller chunks, to reassemble it on the destination node. NNCP also supports that feature, especially important when dealing with small capacity removable storage devices.

Packets prioritizing

UUCP and NNCP will push higher priority ("grade" in UUCP terminology) packets first. You mail will pass, even when many gigabytes files are queued in parallel.

SMTP integration

Mail servers like Postfix and Exim offers documentation and configuration file examples how to use it with UUCP. Sendmail could be integrated with UUCP rather easily too. For using NNCP, just replace UUCP commands with NNCP ones.

Push/poll

With SMTP, you have to wait online when remote peers will push you the messages. There are extensions to the protocol allowing poll-model, but they are not used everywhere. This is very important to be independent from specified model and be able to exchange the data with possibility you have.

DTN (delay tolerant networking)

SMTP will drop messages that can not be delivered for a long time (several days). Others are tolerant for the long delays.

Routing

UUCP and NNCP does not known nothing about routing. You have to explicitly tell how to send (what hops to use) packets to each node.

PSTN support ¶

UUCP and FidoNet always have been working with modems out-of-box. Only many years later they gained support for working over TCP/IP connections. SMTP works only over TCP/IP. NNCP currently has only TCP daemon, but nothing prohibits using of another 8-bit aware online transport.

Anonymous peers ¶

NNCP and FTN are friend-to-friend networks exclusively. This is very secure and mitigates many possible man-in-the-middle (MitM) and Sybil attacks.

Sneakernet friendliness ¶

No one, except NNCP, supports data exchanging via removable storages likes flash drives, CD-ROMs, tapes and hard drives out-of-box. It can be emulated for many FTN software, by manually copying files in its inbound/outbound directories. But UUCP and SMTP software requires more manual work to do so.

Also there is copy of comparable commands of UUCP and NNCP, just for the interest:

Purpose	UUCP	NNCP
Connect to remote system	uucico -s, uupoll	nncp-call, nncp-caller
Receive connection (pipe, daemon, etc)	uucico (-l or similar)	nncp-daemon
Request remote execution, stdin piped in	uux	nncp-exec
Copy file to remote machine	uucp	nncp-file
Copy file from remote machine	uucp	nncp-freq
Process received requests	uuxqt	nncp-toss
Move outbound requests to dir (for USB stick, airgap, etc)	N/A	nncp-xfer
Create streaming package of outbound requests	N/A	nncp-bundle

Next: Use cases, Previous: NNCP, Up: NNCP   [Index]