Hi their, guys and gals...
Back again. Seems like every time I turn around, my ISP is trashing out newsgroups. This has now happened with Earthlink and Charter. I am now on the four week free trial with Supernews. So far so good. Hoping it will be worth the 6 bucks a month. Anybody else watching ISPs do this? mahalo, jo4hn
Yes, that's why I run my own news server (and mail, etc).
-jav
Yep ... the technical expertise needed to run an nntp server, although slight, seems beyond most ISP's these days. When we cut back on our bandwidth a year or so back, and after some fits and starts with other third party nntp servers, I settled on GigaNews and have been very satisfied.
I pay news.individual.net 10 euro a year (13 bucks or so) for a stable, fast, reliable newsfeed. No binaries, but they filter out the spam and it always works.
Dave Hinz
The technical expertise required to run a news server with full binaries is huge. The cost is also huge, especially considering the relatively low usage at most ISPs.
The incoming bandwidth for a news server with binaries can exceed 100 megabit/second. There is also the issue of the terabyte or more of fast disk space required.
Brian Elfert
I wouldn't call it "huge". It's just another thing that a decent Unix sysadmin should know.
Not if they do it right. If their usage is low enough, they can resell supernews or whomever.
A TB isn't much disk these days. I can't believe I'm writing that, but it's true.
Im in the uk here try using news.btinternet.com free me thinks and does not matter who your isp is i also use opera for the news reader excellent mac or pc
c> Hi their, guys and gals...
*---- Most Unix system administrators will never run a high volume news server, so why would you expect them to have the expertise? *---- Please tell us how to "do it right" at negligible cost. It's a very very substantial cost to my ISP. We stopped even trying to carry a complete newsfeed when daily traffic exceeded 300 GB. How much do you pay for transit for 300 GB per day? How much does your RAID cost to store a month's worth of posts?
Reselling supernews isn't the same as maintaining a news server and newsfeed. Why not just resell connectivity and web hosting instead of being an ISP if that's what you call "hosting a news server".
Yes, it's a very very big disk. Try backing up a terabyte regularly.
OK, let me modify my statement to say that the skills of any decent sysadmin are compatible with running a large NNTP server, and there is little to any unique skill needed. It's just another service running on another port, with bandwidth and storage capacity issues like any other IO intensive app.
Get a reseller account with a bigger newsfeed. Point your clients directly to 'em. And I might be inspired to spend more time on your problem if your tone wasn't so adversarial.
If you're storing a month worth of posts, and that's a problem, I'd say you're not doing it right.
Server, no. Feed, yes, at least as the customer sees it. You can even tweak your dns so that news.yourisp.com is the right server.
"providing NNTP service to your customers". If the appropriate method is to host it, great. If the appropriate method is to offload it, then that's fantastic too.
Just a terabyte? Yeah, um, that's not actually a problem. Depends on the resources available to you, doesn't it.
MMMMWWHHOAAAAAAHAHA.
Apparently only if you couldn't spell "sysadmin" in say, 1998. ;)
The technical expertise should not be "huge" to any decently trained technical staff. That is not to deny that the equipment/bandwidth requirements may indeed be scalable to encompass "huge", however that is quantified.
What's "huge" to an SBC, or MCI, et al? These are the corporate deep pockets, who bought out all the smaller ISP's, who actually ran nntp servers (with full binaries) on smaller pipes, with fewer hardware resources, with fewer problems by far, and who could do it without having to read "help desk" style prompt sheets when called upon to answer a basic question ... god forbid the latter in this day and age.
Nope ... I'll stick by my original contention: the technical expertise seems beyond most ISP's these days.
Rob - you're a very sick person.
I like you!
V
Yep, Direcway just plain dropped newsgroups a couple of years ago because "nobody used them" according to an on-line survey they did. [Funny, I never received any information about any such survey :-( ]
Tried Teranews for a while -- it was a disaster, they were down more than up, I couldn't see most of the binaries in abpw for some reason, some articles never posted, and some responses were never seen: and that was for the paid server.
Moved to Supernews a little over a year ago -- thus far, it has been almost completely trouble-free. They are a little overzealous in some of their policies, for example, if one posts a URL that contains certain words indicating it might be a for sale site, Supernews will reject the posting indicating that rec.ww is not a commercial newsgroup. At a high level, that kind of policy is OK, but there are times when sharing information about various things that are available makes such a URL information, not commercial sales. Other than that, Supernews is really good, you'll like it.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
When it comes to puters, I'm on the stupid end of the scale; however, I'm also in SoCal, use Earthlink, and have no problems getting NewsGroup postings.
What am I missing?
Lew
Omygawd. I think I missed you most of all.
Sorry for writing this in crayon........
j4 the looneyburger
Maybe I can 'splain a bit further. I signed up with Earthlink dial-up in 1997 when there was no inexpensive high speed link. I never bothered to change to something else until I moved to the mountains in 2003. There was a local cable company (bought out by Charter) that offered some high speed connectivity. So they became my physical carrier with EL atop. EL later decided that I should be using their high speed offerings rather than Charter so they blew off my news group support. The catch22 was that they didn't offer any high speed connectivity out here in the sticks. Thus I dropped EL and went to charter for a bit until they decided they didn't want to support news groups either. In each case, I'm sure it was an actuarial decision. It still sucks. grumble, jo4hn
Have you tried using google groups to join rec.woodworking?
I'm not the OP, but the problem with Google is that it's just not the same. I download messages and respond as I have time - off-line, as it were.
They also don't support binaries of any kind. So alt.binaries.pictures.woodworking is out of the question.
Doesn't satisfy my Usenet needs, anyway...
FWIW,
Greg G.
...a brown one, no less....
=o}
I got the telephonic equivalent of a blank stare when I asked my local ISP about their limit of 1 nntp connection. Really, 1 connection.... even with DSL, that makes usenet unusable until *every*thing has loaded.
I switched to Teranews' free service, which worked great until they changed whatever they changed a couple of months ago. Something about their article numbering... I don't know. It doesn't work with Thoth, nor with any of the NewsWatcher derivatives so far as I can tell. Ten million new articles, mark 'em read, and get nine million more, but only two articles current and readable.
Scratch Teranews.
So now, my telco bought my ISP, and their nntp seems decent. I haven't bothered checking who provides it, but I doubt they do it themselves (since they totally hosed the changeover, to the point that I had no DSL for 10 days, and only had dialup for a day and a half until everything got fixed).
A two-connection limit, but I can live with that.
Kevin
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