"Guilhem Bonnefille"
<address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:34:48 +0100:
> As pan2 is able to manage more than one server at a time, I wish to
> use this in order to increase my download experience.
> I set up some servers (I found on the Net). But I'm not sure that they
> help me. All the real downloads are made on my ISP's news server.
>
> Which free public news servers are you using? Any list of such servers
> somewhere?
Generally speaking, free servers offering text groups aren't rare, but
binary servers are as they are incredibly resource intensive. Of course,
for multi-server use it's generally the binary servers you are interested
in as text updates aren't usually a problem in the first place as text
posts already come down speedily enough.
It's also fairly common for various entities to host their own news servers
covering (mostly text) groups of interest to their customers/users. Even
when the same groups are available elsewhere, propagation and general user
experience is often far better if using the "home" server for these types
of groups. The most widely known of these are the MS news servers,
hosting the microsoft.public.* hierarchy, available at
msnews.microsoft.com . I've seen mention of Symantec hosting its own
groups too, but have never been interested enough to follow up. Likewise
with Steve Gibson's grc.com.
Of course of interest to anyone following the pan or other mailing lists
is gmane.org 's list2news service, which I and others depend on to follow
our lists, including this one. Somehow, I'd rather follow my lists as
news than as mail. Because it is a list2news gateway, it carries unique
"groups" not generally available elsewhere, most of which are set
"moderated", as gmane relays any posts to the mailing list. Thus, if it's
a subscription required to post list as many are, you want to subscribe to
the list in "vacation" mode, that is, subscribe, but then tell the
list-serve not to send you the mail, as you'll be reading it off of gmane.
That way you can still post. (An alternative would be digest mode, where
you get a summary mail that includes all the posts to the list every few
days. Some people following the lists on gmane find that convenient for
archiving.)
There are also free general purpose text group servers. These are often
run by universities or similar, and carry the official "big-8" hierarchy
(soc.*, rec.* sci.*, comp.*, etc), but may or may not carry the looser
non-binary alt.* groups. Finally, there are still fidonet gateways
around. I know little about these groups except that fidonet was an early
distributed message network alternative to news, thus the gateway. I do
understand these remain popular in places such as Russia.
As I said, free binary servers are far harder to come by, as demand
quickly tends to outstrip the resources available at a "free" level.
Thus, what you tend to find is one of two types. One type severely limits
downloads, while the other type doesn't, but tends to be very temporary,
so you are constantly changing servers.
The download limiter set often provide the service as an enticement to
signup with them for a regular news subscription. Teranews is one of the
better known of these, limiting to 50MB per day. That's not much, but
it's enough to provide a fill here and there if your main server is
missing the post. Others offer a normally capped free service that's
occasionally uncapped, to give users a sample of what they could be
getting the rest of the time. I believe Octanews does or did this at one
point. If I'm not mistaken, it originated as the news server of a
relatively small ISP, where the owner found he regularly had capacity to
spare on certain days of the week, so he opened it up on those days to all
comers. I believe he's a full service news provider now, as well as an
ISP. I've also seen references to free service at readfreenews and
biggulp, among others, but believe these are both severely capped and
haven't been entirely dependable.
The temporary binary server set is generally higher sometimes
unrestricted speeds, but temporary, as little as a day or two, or a few
weeks. These are often beta servers thrown open to the public for testing
purposes, then later locked down to the regular subscribers, ISP or NSP.
Announcing the availability of free binary service is a quick and often
brutally effective way to test just how much demand your server
CAN handle. It's not unusual for such a test, scheduled for a week or two,
to bring a server to its knees in a matter of hours. As I said, brutally
effective. Often, they'll use the data gathered to reconfigure the server
and open it back up, surviving a day or two the second time, then do it
again, until they have it capacity optimized.
Other times these servers are intended to be subscriber only, but due to
misconfiguration, are open to the public. Sometimes it's login/pass
authentication that takes anything (or address@hidden) as valid,
other times it's intended to be block-IP-address authenticated but they
screw up and allow logins from a public IP block. Etc. Again, once word
of these leak out, notification to the provider that they need to
reexamine their authentication tends to be pretty brutal, sometimes
bringing the service to its knees, sometimes not, depending on how
wide-open the authentication actually was and how on their toes the admins
are.
Occasionally it'll be a publicity thing disguised as an authentication
mistake. This way, they get to control exactly how long it lasts and how
bad it gets, but don't have to deal with the problem of promising
something and not delivering, since it appears it was an authentication
mistake (nothing promised), and can be fixed any time they want. This is
suspected of being a primary tactic of some of the servers associated with
porn providers, just as the spam claiming similar "secret passwords" is
often just an advertising gimmick.
In any case, following these temporary servers can be a real hassle, since
every time you switch servers, using /most/ clients, you lose
read/downloaded/deleted-message tracking. (pan's no exception, you lose
it. I believe BNR2/3 is an example of a client that doesn't, as it uses a
database to track by message-ID independent of server specific group
specific xref numbers.) Of course, it also takes time and work to
keep up with just which servers are open at any given time. Thus, despite
its being free and there often being enough of them around to fill one's
immediate needs, most folks quickly tire of this game and either give up
entirely, or fork over the money for a good pay server.
FWIW, the group alt.binaries.news-server-comparison, as is common, often
abbreviated to a.b.nsc or simply abnsc, can be a very good (and
educational) resource for those interested in following what's happening
on the scene. Last I was in there (which was a couple years ago so it's
not all that recently), admins from a number of news services hung out
there, as well as users. They didn't tend to discuss the free bin side
that much, tending more toward professional and technical discussions, but
the question came up fairly frequently and someone there was always
willing to point folks to a free server or two, or to some website listing
and comparing current free servers. I'd certainly recommend folks spend
some time there if possible before plunking down money on an NSP, or
switching ISPs due to news service, however, as it was VERY educational
for me, raising my awareness of the dynamics of the news community
substantially. As it happened, I switched ISPs (to Cox) based on
knowledge gained there, lowering my monthly subscription fees
substantially, while increasing both general internet and news speeds. At
the time, I figured I was going to have to fork over for a dedicated NSP
and was actually in the group researching that. When I switched to Cox, I
figured the $15/mo I was saving on internet could go to an NSP if
necessary, but as it happened, Cox's servers were relatively good, and it
wasn't necessary for a couple years, so I was able to keep that $15/mo in
my pocket. Now is a different story and I'm paying for a third party news
provider, but Cox remains one of the better buys for my money in terms of
internet connection, so while I'm not able to pocket that $15/mo any more,
I'd be paying it elsewhere as well, either in increased internet
connectivity fees or in third party news fees, one of the two. Still,
$10-15 saved per month over a period of two years, isn't an insubstantial
savings at all, and it's due to a.b.nsc that I was able to make the good
choice I did. (BTW you may also see an
alt.binaries.news.server.comparison or similar. That's /not/ the right
group, and probably just a spam dump if used at all.)
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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