Hey Barry - you ran some rather huge NNTP servers, back in the day, you have any comments on this? Scott Helms wrote:
Miles,
Usenet was normally asymmetrical between servers, even when server operators try to seed equally as being fed. It's a function of how a few servers are the source original content and how long individual servers choose (and have the disk) to keep specific content.
It was never designed to have as many server nodes as you're describing and I'd imagine there's some nasty side effects if we tried get that many active servers going as we have customers.
On Mar 1, 2015 10:25 AM, "Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net <mailto:mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>> wrote:
Scott,
Asymmetric measured where? Between client and server or between servers? I'm thinking the case where we each have a server running locally - how do you get a high level of asymmetry in a P2P environment?
Miles Fidelman
Scott Helms wrote:
Anything based on NNTP would be extremely asymmetric without significant changes to the protocol or human behavior.
We ran significant Usenet servers with binaries for nearly 20 years and without for another 5 and the servers' traffic was heavily asymmetric.
On Mar 1, 2015 9:11 AM, "Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net <mailto:mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> <mailto:mfidelman@meetinghouse.net <mailto:mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>>> wrote:
Aled Morris wrote:
Sadly we don't have many "killer applications" for symmetric residential bandwidth, but that's likely because we don't have the infrastructure to incubate these applications.
Come to think of it, if USENET software wasn't so cumbersome, I kind of wonder if today's "social network" would consist of home servers running NNTP - and I expect the traffic would be very symmetric. (For that matter, with a few tweaks, the USENET model would be great for "groupware" - anybody remember the Netscape communications server that added private newsgroups and authentication to the mix?)
Miles Fidelman
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra