On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, John van Oppen wrote:
we don't run one either... :)
The last person I know who was running one, was in the proccess of killing it.
I used to run one, but haven't, since about 2000 :) The provider i worked for at the time got out of the game and outsourced news because otherwise we would have needed to dump a lot of money into disk space to keep people from bitching about the sub-24 hr retention times on alt.binaries.$VICE :( That was the blessing and the curse of cyclical filesystems, I guess :) On the plus side, Highwind's news server software just flat-out ran - never gave me a single problem in the 3 years I ran it. That plus a separate box running diablo to manage the feeds was a winning combination :) More and more people are outsourcing news because providing good news service requires tons of disk space and loads of network bandwidth, i.e. it costs a lot of money to operate, and for many providers, it doesn't make any money. The last time I looked at newsfeed stats, a full feed with all the alt.binaries crap was running around 350 GB/day - I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's substantially higher now. jms