01.11.26

Usenet top1000

I find it interesting how far Usenet has fallen that me posting a few random posts in a few newsgroups over the last few weeks makes it that my private server all of a sudden is one of the top 150 Usenet servers:

...
120 0.546275 local-4.nntp.ord.giganews.com
121 0.526391 news.usenet.ovh
122 0.522859 wilderland.ovh
123 0.496498 f4441.n5020
124 0.473145 f8912.n5020
125 0.472186 f278.n5010

…

 

Honestly there isn’t anyone but me who uses this server as such, besides one more person who is connected via uucp links (but I haven’t seen him post anything lately). 

The Usenet top1000 are a rather old tradition, to the point that the package to take part is in various Linux repositories: it simply counts how often a particular server shows up in posts seen by various servers and calculates how much of the whole message network it makes up. 

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01.3.26

Peering an INN usenet server

A diagram of some Usenet servers and clients. The blue, green, and red dots on the servers represent which groups they carry. Arrows between servers indicate that the servers are sharing the articles from the groups. Arrows between computers and servers indicate that the user is subscribed to a certain group, and uploads and downloads articles to and from that server. Source: Wikipedia, created by Benjamin D. Esham (bdesham)

INN (short for InterNetNews) is currently the most common newsserver around. And it seems it’s actually comparatively easy to configure for a newsserver. It still is bloody opaque for a newbie though.

For the sake of people like me who’d like to peer with someone else but don’t know what to do, here’s how it works:
You need a peer (of course) who let’s you peer with them.
The easy way is to ask on news.admin.peering, people there are generally really helpful to prospective new admins. And mind you, I am not an expert, this is what I found works.

Then you will need to add stuff to three files in /etc/news: incoming.conf, innfeed.conf, and newsfeeds.

The entry for incoming.conf looks like this

incoming.conf:
peer usenet.example.com {
hostname: usenet.example.com
}

The one for infeed.conf looks like that:

innfeed.conf:
peer usenet.example.com {
ip-name: usenet.example.com
}

Both of which are rather simple. Then comes newsfeeds which gets a bit more complicated:

newsfeeds
usenet.example.com/server\
:*,!local.*,@*bina*,!control,!control.*\
:Tm,<1000000:innfeed!

This is where most of the magic happens: the first star in the second line tells to accept every message from your peer. The !control.* takes out all the messages from the control.* hierarchy. The !local does the same for local groups.
The @bina is intended to make all binary groups poison groups, meaning messages will be discarded if they are even just cross-posted to a binary group. Most text-only usenet servers don’t want any binary posts at all, some do allow smaller graphics. None of them want the hassle of dealing with binary groups.

The <1000000 tells you how large the messages are allowed to be (in this case for a text server a rather permissive 1mb).
The Tm flags specifies how it the feed is handled , you can read more about flags on the man page.

 

 

Federation Tag: @usenet

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