Usenet News
Note:
This page is gone wacko with stuff. It needs to
be reorganized. I can hardly find what I am looking
for in it, much less anyone else.
What is Usenet?
Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of
a set of "newsgroups" with names that are classified hierarchically
by subject. "Articles" or "messages" are "posted" to these
newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software
-- these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer
systems via a wide variety of networks. Some newsgroups are
"moderated"; in these newsgroups, the articles are first sent to a
moderator for approval before appearing in the newsgroup. Usenet
is available on a wide variety of computer systems and networks,
but the bulk of modern Usenet traffic is transported over either the
Internet or UUCP. " - Chip Salzenberg, "What Is USENET?"
Bolo's Philosophy of Usenet
To steal a phrase, Usenet is Big. Very Big. Bigger than
you can possibly imagine.
The amount of data travelling through usenet systems
is huge. As an example, uwvax stores about 120,000 articles per day,
at an average article size of 3-4 KB. That's about one-half
of a gigabyte of news per day. Every day, seven days a week,
4 weeks per month, 12 months per year. Hmmm ... Let's see...
- __0.7 GB/day
- __5 GB/week
- _20 GB/month
- 250 GB/year ... yes, that's 1/4 a Terabyte!
And uwvax doesn't carry "all" the usenet traffic, just the
primary groups!
While those figures don't look so bad, they ignore the
occasional (often weekly) rushes of traffic,
which can easily double the above flow!
If sustained, such as it was for the four weeks surrounding
the 1995-1996 holiday season, that's 1/2 a Terabyte a year.
And remember the old axiom ... Usenet traffic doubles every 6
months ...
Local News Configuration
News Exchangers
uwvax exchanges news on a peer basis
with the following organizations.
The order approximates the inbound volume from a site.
- University of Chicago
- Altair Engineering -- Detroit, MI
- University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, WI
- Heurikon Corporation -- Madison, WI
- University of Kyoto -- Japan
- Fullfeed Communications -- Madison, WI
News Feeds
These sites are Usenet leaf-nodes from uwvax's
point of view.
Rutgers isn't a leaf, but they stopped reciprocating their newsfeed
to uwvax.
I've kept feeding them as a courtesy.
- State Lab of Hygiene -- UW Madison
- Rutgers University, New Jersey
- Persoft Inc., -- Madison, WI
- Astronautics, Inc. -- Madison, WI
- Earthreach Communications -- Appleton, WI
Transport Software
- inn 1.4sec2 with local modifications
- nntplink 3.3 with local modifications
- innfeed
Unix News Readers
- gnus
GNUS is yet another add-on to emacs.
- nn 6.5.0 beta 3
NN is the first high volume newsreader. Its philosophy
is to make it easy to filter the chaff from
news the reader wants to see.
- trn 3.6
Threaded-RN. Trn organizes conversations into threads.
Threads allow the reader to easily follow the actual posting,
replies, and replies to replies, etc. Even if the subject
changes, trn allows subsidary threads to be tracked as well!
- xrn
A RN-like news reader for the X Windows System.
News utilities
Software which also reads news
- lynx
- mosaic
- netscape
- pine
DOS, OS/2 and Windows News Readers
Spam Policy
Expiration
Newsgroups
Distributions
What exactly, is Usenet
Reading News
Readers
Servers
Other Software
So ... You want to post to Usenet?
Sources of Information
News Hierarchies
News Administration
News Technology
Privacy
Standards
Draft Standards
RFCs
These RFCs contain important information about Usenet news.
They aren't entirely news oriented, but the news RFCs refer
to some of the other ones (such as RFC822 for message format).
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Last Modified:
Wed Jun 5 12:01:43 CDT 2002
bolo (Josef Burger)
<bolo@cs.wisc.edu>