Among the responses I received to my post requesting info on
setting up a news feed for Usenet were two that have an
extraordinary amount of information. It was requested that I
post the responses for others on bionet who may have similar
questions. Thanks to everyone that responded.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RESPONSE #1:
Date: 30 Jul 1992 21:01:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: una at happy.phy.duke.edu (Una Smith)
Subject: RE: Usenet news feed. How to?
In-reply-to: <1992Jul30.174257.8866 at usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
To: ca566 at cleveland.freenet.edu
Message-id: <9207310101.AA06594 at happy. phy.duke.edu>
Organization: Duke University Physics Dept.; Durham, N.C.
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
>Newsgroups: bionet.general
I am not surprised at the behavior of netnews at Stony Brook,
since you say an undergraduate set it up, then split. Usenet
is something that requires a small amount of daily attention
once it's up and going smoothly. The principal difficulty
is that it takes a LOT of disk space, if you're going to get
all the groups, EVEN if you expire every message after a day
or so. That said, since you're interested in being a netnews
administrator, Stony Brooks' newsfeed should be fine soon.
Check news.answers for background FAQ's on how to set up a
Usenet feed and get the software etc. going at your site.
Then figure out where Stony Brook is now getting its feed,
and find out whether that site has its act together. If
they're OK, then ask the administrator there to show you
how to fix things for yourself.
Offers for newsfeeds from Genbank aside, there are very good
reasons why you should be getting your feed from a nearby
site. Foremost, so that local domains such as CT or north-
east work OK. Also, if you're getting a feed from a nearby
site, you can visit them in person to see how they've config-
ured their disk space, and set up the various maintenance
daemons etc. These are both big advantages.
Finally, please save all the replies you get on this topic,
and post a summary for the benefit of the rest of the readers.
This question comes up every few months, and it's about time
to put together a proper FAQ including a few comments about
how to get bionet via Usenet.
If you find anything I've said to be incorrect or inadequate,
please let me know, since it's been a while since I've had to
worry about Usenet feeds (only a year, actually, but I purged
my mind of such things once it became someone else's job to
ake care of getting Usenet at Duke outside the CS dept.) .
Also, I'm moving to Yale in a month, and I've already been
assigned the task of getting a Usenet feed for the computer
cluster in my new department (Biology), so whatever you learn
will be especially useful to me...
Best of luck!
Una
--
Una Smith una at phy.duke.edu School of the Environment
Duke University
Durham, NC 27706
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RESPONSE #2:
Date: 30 Jul 1992 14:31:11 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Ernest Retzel (1535 49118)" <ernest at lenti.med.umn.edu>
Subject: newsfeeds
To: ca566 at cleveland.freenet.edu
Message-id: <9207301931.AA10830 at lenti.med.umn.edu>
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
I just got some info for a friend from my friendly news admin type;
it is less than trivial to set up....here is what i got baack from him.
Ernie Retzel
ernest at lenti.med.umn.edu
********************************************************************
Subject: Re: news
To: ernest at lenti (Ernest Retzel)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
> I have a friend at another institution who is interested in getting a
> new feed for their place. He has no idea where to start, and neither do
> I--any pointers would be appreciated.
I think there is a posting ``How to become a Usenet site'' in
news.answers (if you can't find it there let me know and I'll track it
down). He'll need C News to process the news, nntp to transfer the
news between sites, and rn or nn to read the news. All of this stuff
is available from news.cis.umn.edu by anon-ftp. Lastly, he'll need to
get a feed of Usenet from another site. Usually, folks try to get a
feed that is ``netographically'' close to them (e.g. possibly a
neighboring institution).
Let me know if you need more info.
-jason
Subject: Re: news
To: ernest at lenti (Ernest Retzel)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Date: 20 Jun 92 05:00:37 GMT
Article-I.D.: athena.site-setup_709016412
Expires: Mon, 3 Aug 1992 05:00:12 GMT
Sender: news at athena.mit.edu (News system)
Followup-To: poster
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Archive-name: site-setup
Version: $Id: site-setup,v 1.75 1992/06/17 20:29:21 jik Exp $
[Wish list: (1) More details about other questions raised below in
square braces, and marked with XXX. (2) A posting that I can mention
in this one that describes mail software for sites that are not UNIX
sites.]
This article attempts to summarize, in a general way, the steps
involved in setting up a machine to be on the USENET.
It assumes that you already have some sort of USENET access
(otherwise, how did you get this article?), or at the very least, that
you have ftp or mail server access to get to some of the files
mentioned in it, and that you are trying to configure your own site to
be on the USENET after using some other site for some period of time.
If this assumption is incorrect, then ask whoever made this article
available to you to help you get access to the resources mentioned
below.
Before reading this posting, you should be familiar with the
contents of the introductory postings in the news.announce.newusers
newsgroup, most importantly the posting entitled "USENET Software:
History and Sources". Many of the terms used below are defined in
those postings. The news.announce.newusers postings are accessible in
the periodic posting archive on pit-manager.mit.edu [18.172.1.27], in
/pub/usenet via anonymous ftp, or via E-mail by sending a message to
mail-server at pit-manager.mit.edu (send a message with "help" in the
body to get more information).
*************************
There are five basic steps involved in configuring a machine to be a
USENET site.
1. Make the decision -- do you *really* want to do this?
If you just want to read USENET yourself, then putting your machine
onto the USENET is probably not what you want to do. The process of
doing so can be time-consuming, and regular maintenance is also
required. Furthermore, the resources consumed by a full USENET setup
on a machine are significant:
- disk space for the programs (a few Mb for the binaries, another
couple of Mb for any sources you keep online);
- disk space for the articles - currently approaching 400Mb a
month, although it is possible to minimize the amount of disk
space consumed by article by carefully selecting which
newsgroups and/or hierarchies you wish to receive;
- modem time (possibly long-distance) transferring the articles to
your machine (assuming that you are using a modem rather than an
Internet NNTP connection); and
- fees if you're paying someone to provide you with a news feed.
You might choose, instead, to get an account on a public-access
USENET site on which you can read news by dialing up. See, for
example, the "Nixpub posting" articles in comp.misc and the "NetPub
listing" articles in alt.bbs.lists for lists of such sites.
Even if there are no public-access USENET sites that are a local
phone call away from you, you might still choose this approach,
especially if you only read a few (low traffic) groups. Using a
public-access site that is accessible via PC Pursuit or some other
packet network might still be cheaper and/or easier than setting up
the feed, transferring the news and configuring your machine to store
news locally.
You should be sure that the benefits you are going to get by storing
news locally are going to outweigh the costs before deciding to
proceed. In summary, however, let me say that this decision is not
always a clear one. To explain why, let me include an alternative
perspective, from joe at jshark.rn.com, on why getting a feed may be
appropriate even for a single-user machine:
>When you get to long distance calls, reading the news on-line gets the
>cost rising fast. A few seconds to skip an article you've no interest
>in, maybe a minute to take in a good one plus more time to save it and
>download it later. But when the whole lot is batched together (as
>news), a) it only takes a few minutes and b) it's all conveniently
>automated. Sure, configuring the hardware and software may take a
>(small) time - but it's something you only do once.
>>And unless you want to get comp.*, the disk space needed is not that
>great. (20Mb disks are about 100 dollars over here; the saving in
>phone charges would pay for that in a few months)
>>I also find that replying takes time, and this is where on-line
>"reading" would start to really burn dollars! The alternative, {
>download - logout - compose reply - dial back in - login - post (or
>mail) reply}, is a) inconvenient and b) still costly.
>>Perhaps I see "news administration" as a simple task *because* I only
>provide news to one other site and get a very limited feed. (No
>overflowing disks, no "disappearing inodes", neither angry users nor
>management.) The initial stages were a bit fraught (200kb batches
>being bounced back because of permission problems :-( ), but very
>little effort now. I have an impression, based on your address and
>past postings, that you are involved in "system management" at MIT so
>you see things from a "major site" point of view??
2. Find a site to feed you news and/or mail.
In order to make your machine a USENET site, you need to find other
sites on the USENET that are willing to feed you news and/or mail.
You might want to locate more than one such site if you want higher
reliability.
Finding feeds for a UUCP site.
If you are going to be using a modem (and, presumably, UUCP) to
transfer your news and mail, then then there are several resources you
can use when trying to locate a feed site:
a. Comp.mail.maps
Find the postings in the comp.mail.maps newsgroup for your state,
country, or whatever. Look in it for sites that sound like they are
local to you. Contact their administrators and ask if they would be
willing to give you a feed.
Comp.mail.maps is archived at several anonymous ftp and mail
server sites, including ftp.uu.net, so you can examine map entries
even if the maps have expired at your news-reading site (or if you
do not currently have USENET access). See the article entitled
"UUCP map for README" in the comp.mail.maps newsgroup or archives
for more information about the maps.
The comp.mail.maps postings are also archived in
pit-manager.mit.edu's periodic posting archive, which was mentioned
in detail above.
b. News.admin
Post a message to news.admin. If at all possible, post it with a
restricted distribution, so that only people who are likely to be
able to give you a feed will have to get it (e.g. if you have
posting access on a machine in Massachusetts, and the site you're
setting up is going to be in Massachusetts, then post with a
distribution of "ne").
Note that you can post to news.admin even if you do not have
direct USENET access right now, as long as you have E-mail access --
send your message to news-admin at ucbvax.berkeley.edu. However, if
you use ucbvax's gateway, you probably can't use a restricted
distribution as described above, since ucbvax probably isn't in the
distribution you want to post to, and besides, it's not clear that
it listens to the "Distribution:" header in postings that are mailed
to it.
When posting your message, try to be as specific as possible.
Mention where you are, how you intend to transfer news from your
feed site to you (e.g. what kind of modem, how fast), approximately
how many newsgroups you are going to want to get and from which
hierarchies, and perhaps what kind of machine it's all for. A
descriptive Subject line such as "news feed wanted -- Boston, MA" is
also useful.
If there is a regional hierarchy for the distribution in which you
want a feed, then you might want to post a message in one of the
regional newsgroups as well, or cross-post your message to one of
the regional newsgroups. Look first for an "admin" group (e.g.
"ne.admin"), then (if there is no admin group) a "config" group,
then for a "wanted" group.
c. Commercial services
If all else fails, you may have to resort to paying someone to
provide you with a feed. I know about the following service
providers [XXX I would like to augment this list by indicating, for
each organization listed, which of the following four services it
provides: connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds. If
you can tell me with a reasonable level of assurance which of these
services are provided by any of the companies listed below, please
let me know]:
Anterior Technology
P.O. Box 1206
Menlo Park, CA 94026-1206
Voice: (415) 328-5615
Fax: (415) 322-1753
info at fernwood.mpk.ca.us
(UUCP, connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
CERFnet
P.O. Box 85608
San Diego, CA 92186-9784
Voice: (800) 876-CERF
help at cerf.net
(connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
Colorado SuperNet, Inc.
Attn: David C. Menges
Colorado School of Mines
1500 Illinois
Golden, CO 80401
Voice: 303-273-3471
dcm at csn.org
(UUCP, news feeds)
DMConnection
267 Cox St.
Hudson, Ma. 01749
Voice: (508) 562-1618
Fax: (508) 562-1133
info at dmc.com
(UUCP, news feeds, mail feeds, MX forwarding, file servers, mailing lists,
large volume archives)
JvNCnet
6-B von Neumann Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08543
Voice: (800) 35-TIGER
market at jvnc.net
(connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
MSEN, Inc.
628 Brooks Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
Voice: (313) 741-1120
info at msen.com
(UUCP, connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
MV Communications, Inc.
P.O. Box 4963
Manchester, NH 03108-4963
Voice: (603) 429-2223
Data: (603) 429-1735 (log in as "info" or "rates")
info at mv.mv.com
(UUCP, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
NEARnet (New England Academic and Resarch Network)
Attn: John Curran
BBN Systems and Technologies
MS 6/3B
10 Moulton Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Voice: (617) 873-8730
Fax: (617) 873-5620
jcurran at nic.near.net
(connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds (for
NEARnet sites))
Netcom - Online Communication Services
P.O. Box 20774
San Jose, CA 95160
Voice: (408) 554-8649
bobr at netcom.com
(UUCP, connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
Performance Systems International, Inc.
11800 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 1100
Reston, VA 22091
Voice: (703) 620-6651 or (800) 827-7482
Computerized info: all-info at psi.com
Human-based info: info at psi.com
(UUCP, connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
SURAnet
8400 Baltimore Blvd.
College Park, MD 20742
Voice: (301) 982-3214
Fax: (301) 982-4605
news-admin at sura.net
(connectivity, name service (for SURAnet sites), news feeds (for
SURAnet sites))
UUNET Canada, Inc.
1 Yonge St., Suite 1801
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5E 1W7
Voice: (416) 368-6621
Fax: (416) 369-0515
info at uunet.ca or uunet-ca at uunet.uu.net
(UUCP, connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
UUNET Technologies Inc.
3110 Fairview Park Drive, Suite 570
Falls Church, VA 22042
Voice: (703) 876-5050
Fax: (703) 876-5059
info at uunet.uu.net
AlterNet (network connectivity) info: alternet-info at uunet.uu.net
(UUCP, connectivity, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
UUNORTH, Inc.
Box 445, Station E
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M6H 4E3
Voice: (416) 537-4930 or (416) 225-UNIX
Fax: (416) 537-4890
WIMSEY
Attn: Stuart Lynne
225B Evergreen Dr.
Port Moody, BC, V3H 1S1
Voice: 604-93-7532
sl at vanbc.wimsey.bc.ca
(UUCP, name service, MX forwarding, news feeds)
Xenon Systems
Attn: Julian Macassey
742 1/2 North Hayworth Ave.
Hollywood, CA 90046-7142
Voice: (213) 654-2822
postmaster at xenon.sr.com
(UUCP, news feeds, mail feeds)
Note that some of these are actually network service providers which
provide Internet connectivity, but some will also provide news feeds
to their customers. For more information about many network service
providers, see the anonymous ftp file /nsfnet/referral-list on
nnsc.nsf.net.
Some regional network service providers, especially in large urban
areas, offer both UUCP and TCP/IP service via modem or leased line.
If you can find such a company, the cost of a dedicated (leased
line) Internet connection will often be cheaper and more desirable
than a UUCP connection, if you plan on using it for a full newsfeed
or for frequent downloading. Some companies can offer combined
voice and data connections using T1 links, for large-scale users
seeking both Internet access and low-cost toll telephone service.
For more information about the possibility of hooking up to the
network, see the "How to Get Information about Networks" posting in
news.announce.newusers.
NOTE: I am not endorsing any of these companies in any way. I
don't know anything about the level or quality of service either of
them provides. They are simply the ones I know about. If you know
of a site that provides feeds and think it should be mentioned here,
please let me know.
d. European users
In Europe, you can get a feed from one of EUNet's national
networks. They charge for feeds but are "non-commercial," which
means (I assume) that the fees go to the maintenance of the
networks. Most provide help on getting started, can provide source
for the mail and news software and lists of sites who have indicated
they will provide feeds. They also act as Internet forwarders (see
below for more information on this). To contact them, try sending
mail to postmaster at country.eu.net or newsmaster at country.eu.net. The
"country" in this case should be whatever country you're in.
Note that the national networks have a "no redistribution" policy
and have the option to cut off sites which break this rule. There
are other groups (such as sublink); see (a) and (b) above for
suggestions on how to contact them.
There is a sort of "rebel" network for news and mail distribution
in France for sites that do not want to use the EUnet feed. For
more information, contact tms at frmug.UUCP.
Note that it is to your advantage to try to find a feed site that is
directly on the Internet, if you are not going to be. Getting a feed
from a site on the Internet will allow that site to act as your MX
forwarder (see section 5 below), and the fact that you are only one
hop off of the Internet will make both mail and news delivery fast
(assuming that the feed you get from the Internet site is for both
mail and news; of course, if you can only find someone willing to
forward mail to you but not to traffic with you the heavier load of a
news feed, then your mail delivery will still be fast).
Finding feeds for an Internet site.
If you are on the Internet and would like your news feed to be over
the Internet rather than over a modem link, then you *might* want to
look in the UUCP maps in comp.mail.maps, as mentioned above, since
many USENET sites that are on the Internet are mentioned there.
News.admin and the commercial services listed above are also viable
options. Another option which is relevant only to Internet sites is
to send mail to the mailing list nntp-managers at ucbvax.berkeley.edu,
and ask if anyone on that list is willing to provide you with a news
feed. If you do this, be specific, just as if you were posting to
news.admin as described above.
3. Get the software.
The "USENET Software" posting referenced above goes into quite a bit
of detail about the software that is available. There are three
components in the software at a USENET site: (a) the software that
transports the news (usually using either UUCP or NNTP), (b) the
software that stores the news on the local disks, expires old
articles, etc., and (c) the news-readers for looking at the news.
For example, if you're a UNIX site on the Internet and you're going
to be getting your news feed over the Internet, then you are probably
going to want to get the NNTP and C news packages mentioned in the
"USENET Software" posting, as well as one or more of the UNIX news
readers mentioned there.
Since you are probably going to be exchanging mail as well as news,
and the mail software that is shipped with the OS you are using might
not be powerful enough to handle mail exchanging with the rest of the
USENET, you might want to obtain new mail software as well. There are
several packages you might choose you use. Discussion of them is
beyond the scope of this document; the books referenced below will
probably provide some useful information in this area. Furthermore,
if you are a UNIX site, the posting by Chris Lewis
<clewis at ferret.ocunix.on.ca> entitled "UNIX Email Software Survey FAQ"
in news.admin, comp.mail.misc and news.answers provides a good
introduction to the UNIX mail software that's out there. Finally,
James H. Thompson <jimmy_t at verifone.com>'s "FAQ - UUCP Mail, News and
Gateway Software for PCs and MACs" posting, in alt.bbs.waffle,
comp.mail.uucp, news.software.readers and vmsnet.uucp, will help you
to find out more about the UUCP software that is available to you if
you wish to run it on a PC or Macintosh computer.
The basic idea is to go read the "USENET Software" posting, and then
to work from there.
Europeans can ask their national backbone site, who will usually
also be a software archive, or be closely associated with one. UKC,
for example, provide an information pack explaining what is needed and
where (and how) to get it.
4. Do what it says.
Most of the software available for news transport or storage comes
with installation instructions. Follow them. This part should be
self-explanatory (although the instructions might not be :-).
5. Register your site on the network.
The "traditional" method of advertising your site to the rest of the
USENET after setting it up is to get an entry for it added to the UUCP
maps. Doing this involves choosing a name for your site and
submitting a map entry indicating the name, other vital statistics,
and a list of your feed sites, preferentially weighted. Since many
USENET sites still rely exclusively on the UUCP maps for routing mail,
you will almost certainly want to register in the maps. To find out
more about how to do this, read the "UUCP map for README" posting in
comp.mail.maps, referenced above.
However, the past several years have witnessed a dramatic increase
in the number of sites choosing to register host names in the Internet
Domain Name Service (DNS) hierarchy, in addition to getting a host
entry added to the UUCP maps. The DNS hierarn I can here. If you are interested in
finding out more about how the DNS works, you are strongly urged yet
again to read the "How to Get Information About Networks" posting and
to follow up on the sources of documentation that it references.]
*************************
In addition to the resources already mentioned, there are several
books which discuss USENET and/or UUCP maintenance. They include
(these entries are culled from the "YABL" posting, by Mitch Wright
<mitch at cirrus.com>, in comp.unix.questions):
TITLE: Managing UUCP and USENET
AUTHOR: O'Reilly, Tim
AUTHOR: Todino, Grace
SUBJECT: Introduction
PUBLISHER: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
DATE: 1990
PAGES: 289
ISBN: 0-937175-48-X
APPROX_COST: 24.95
KEYWORDS: Nutshell Handbook
SUGGESTED_BY: Mitch Wright <mitch at hq.af.mil>
SUPPLIERS
E-mail: ... uunet!ora!nuts
Phone#: 1-800-338-NUTS
TITLE: Unix Communications
AUTHOR: Anderson, Bart
AUTHOR: Costales, Barry
AUTHOR: Henderson, Harry
SUBJECT: Communication Reference
PUBLISHER: The Waite Group
DAT>, Martin Lee
Schoffstall <schoff at psi.com>, Doug Sewell <doug at ysu.edu>, Barry Shein
<bzs at world.std.com>, Vince Skahan <vince at atc.boeing.com>, Jerry Sweet
<jns at fernwood.mpk.ca.us>, David W. Tamkin <dattier at gagme.chi.il.us>,
Christophe Wolfhugel <Christophe.Wolfhugel at grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr> and
Steve Yelvington <steve at thelake.mn.org> provided comments and useful
suggestions about this article.
--
Jonathan Kamens jik at MIT.Edu
MIT Information Systems/Athena Moderator, news.answers
(Send correspondence related to the news.answers news
--
E-mail: mhollowa at ccmail.sunysb.edu (mail to freenet is forwarded)
phone: (516)444-3612
I would claim to speak for my university but no one is likely to
believe it.
