dave@lsuc.uucp (David Sherman) (03/15/88)
If tor.news.stats postings (and our own experiences connecting to utzoo)
are any indication, netnews in Toronto is getting rather old and tired.
Yes, volume has increased, and the decision by one site to cut off
soc, rec, misc and talk has been noted. I haven't given up
on the net yet, though; I believe there are solutions which use
the hardware already available and running.
The problem is, a fair bit of work is required to collect
the data and figure out the best solutions, and I don't have
time for it.
Would someone (ideally a news admin or other reasonably respected
person) care to attempt a solution? What you would need to do is
contact all Toronto-area sysadmins and collect what information
they're willing to give you about
- processing power
- disk space (primarily in terms of space for batching)
- whether they can swallow news during the day (lots of CPU,
or C News)
- number of phone lines and modem speeds (dialin, dialout breakdown;
Trailblazers? 2400 baud?)
- political limitations (some sites don't want news feeds from/to
their direct competitors)
- who they talk to now (this might be accurate in comp.mail.maps)
- whether the sysadmin or newsadmin has time (or can make time --
none of us have time!) to supervise feeds
- whatever other info is relevant
The task would then be to come up with suggestions for
adjustments to the news topology. No-one is going to force anything
on anyone, and indeed, it's better to make small adjustments than
to redo the newsmap from scratch, if only because any two systems
might have problems talking at large volumes.
But I do believe we need to make optimal use of the Trailblazers
in the city; take some load off utzoo; and make use of some
CPU power around that's available to take on new feeds.
If no-one takes on the specific task I've proposed, perhaps the
admins with Trailblazers can at least look at optimizing things.
The sites closest to mnetor and utgpu should be the ones with the
largest combination of CPU cycles and high-speed connections to
other sites, to get the news spread out as fast as possible.
(Of course, they also require sysadmins with time and patience
to monitor the feeds -- that's been one of utzoo's great strengths
over the years.)
There's also the issue of new sites which might be willing to
bring some news in from the U.S. A couple of possibilities
are being explored in that direction.
David Sherman
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{ uunet!mnetor pyramid!utai decvax!utcsri ihnp4!utzoo } !lsuc!dave