Does anyone know of one? Hell, has anyone even considered starting one? For that matter, would anyone be interested or willing to pay for their services if someone did or is bandwidth so cheap that it's just not needed anymore? ...rdc
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Rick Chavez wrote:
Does anyone know of one?
No but would probably be interested as a customer.
Hell, has anyone even considered starting one?
Possibly.
For that matter, would anyone be interested or willing to pay for their services if someone did or is bandwidth so cheap that it's just not needed anymore?
-- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Administration - jay@west.net WestNet: Connecting you to the planet. 805 884-6323 WB6RDV NetLojix Communications, Inc. - http://www.netlojix.com/
Does anyone know of one?
No.
Hell, has anyone even considered starting one?
No, and I doubt anybody seriously has. As a former employee, I can vouch that the transponder costs were prohibitive to any start-up. It's possible that a large established provider might be able to absorb the lease, I doubt it. If it was going to happen, it would've happened when Cidera was available for pennies on the dollar (my assumption, not a known fact). As it stands, the uplink dishes are still sitting unused behind Bergmann's cleaners in Laurel, MD. Damn shame. -J.
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Rick Chavez wrote:
Does anyone know of one?
Hell, has anyone even considered starting one?
For that matter, would anyone be interested or willing to pay for their services if someone did or is bandwidth so cheap that it's just not needed anymore?
Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed with no binaries? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed with no binaries?
Probably. Yes. IIRC, a full feed of usenet (3 years ago) was approx 250GB+ per day. The overwhelming majority of that was multi-part binaries. Cut them out and you should have plenty of room across the transponder, which (again, 3 years ago) was capable of DS3 capacity. I haven't had the misfortune of dealing with usenet feeds since then, so I'm unfamiliar with the requirements of nntp peering today. -J.
"jason" == jason <jason@dixongroup.net> writes:
jason> Probably. Yes. jason> IIRC, a full feed of usenet (3 years ago) was approx 250GB+ jason> per day. The overwhelming majority of that was multi-part jason> binaries. Cut them out and you should have plenty of room jason> across the transponder, which (again, 3 years ago) was capable jason> of DS3 capacity. jason> I haven't had the misfortune of dealing with usenet feeds jason> since then, so I'm unfamiliar with the requirements of nntp jason> peering today. A dedicated OC3 wouldn't really be enough any more, for the full feed (150+ megabits at peak times, average maybe 130 megabits over a day - i.e. 1300 - 1350 GB/day on a heavy day). Cut out the multipart binaries upstream and you only need about a megabit. -- Andrew, Supernews http://www.supernews.com
On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 03:15:47PM -0400, Jon Lewis wrote:
Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed with no binaries?
Jon, I recall some reported problems along those lines. That even without binaries, they were running out of overhead. Given that USENET volume tends to grow, I'm betting that it would require a lot more capacity now. When I first talked to someone using SkyCache about 5 years ago, at the time, they were a very happy customer because they'd been able to offload 12-13 Mbit/s from one of their transit DS-3s by taking a SkyCache feed. However, that was late 1999 or so, and transit prices were more than an order of magnitude higher than they are now. In those days, a lot of SPs were still running their own newsservers, and very few companies were providing outsourced reader access to news. These days, it doesn't make a lot of sense for many SPs to deal with the hassle of taking feeds and maintaining a newsserver, so they outsource reader access for their 4 or 5 customers who are aware that there is something besides the WWW out there. SkyCache was a really nice idea, but given that the number of SPs running their own newsservers has shrunk considerably, and that the outsourced news people won't be interested, the market is much smaller overall. On top of that, the bandwidth requirements have increased, while transit cost has plummeted. As a service, it existed to mitigate the bandwidth requirements of running a newsserver -- now that transit costs have crashed, and many more people are outsourcing their news, I just don't see a viable market in providing push feeds over satellite. I don't know what transponder space is running, but I'm willing to bet it has not gotten much (if any) cheaper. --msa
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Majdi Abbas wrote: I'll bite, and reveal my ultimate cluelessness here. Assuming I wanted to go about setting up an NNTP server, how would I go about getting and maintaining the feeds? There's no "central" authority AFAIK, but does anyone have any knowledge as to relative price and/or bandwidth consumption? -Dan
On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 03:15:47PM -0400, Jon Lewis wrote:
Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed with no binaries?
Jon, I recall some reported problems along those lines. That even without binaries, they were running out of overhead. Given that USENET volume tends to grow, I'm betting that it would require a lot more capacity now.
When I first talked to someone using SkyCache about 5 years ago, at the time, they were a very happy customer because they'd been able to offload 12-13 Mbit/s from one of their transit DS-3s by taking a SkyCache feed.
However, that was late 1999 or so, and transit prices were more than an order of magnitude higher than they are now. In those days, a lot of SPs were still running their own newsservers, and very few companies were providing outsourced reader access to news.
These days, it doesn't make a lot of sense for many SPs to deal with the hassle of taking feeds and maintaining a newsserver, so they outsource reader access for their 4 or 5 customers who are aware that there is something besides the WWW out there.
SkyCache was a really nice idea, but given that the number of SPs running their own newsservers has shrunk considerably, and that the outsourced news people won't be interested, the market is much smaller overall. On top of that, the bandwidth requirements have increased, while transit cost has plummeted. As a service, it existed to mitigate the bandwidth requirements of running a newsserver -- now that transit costs have crashed, and many more people are outsourcing their news, I just don't see a viable market in providing push feeds over satellite. I don't know what transponder space is running, but I'm willing to bet it has not gotten much (if any) cheaper.
--msa
-- <Zaren> Christ almighty... my EYES! They're melting! -Zaren, Efnet #macintosh, in response to: www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/1944 The WEBSITE DESIGN class that gave my fiancee a D. --------Dan Mahoney-------- Techie, Sysadmin, WebGeek Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC ICQ: 13735144 AIM: LarpGM Site: http://www.gushi.org ---------------------------
On Sep 20, 2004, at 7:54 PM, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Majdi Abbas wrote:
I'll bite, and reveal my ultimate cluelessness here.
Assuming I wanted to go about setting up an NNTP server, how would I go about getting and maintaining the feeds? There's no "central" authority AFAIK, but does anyone have any knowledge as to relative price and/or bandwidth consumption?
First, you go out and buy the biggest server you can find, buy more drive space than you can afford. Then, buy more. You *may* be able to get a feed from your upstream service providers. You'll want to have at least 2 feeds and you should have at least OC-3 to each provider to handle the feeds. Don't expect much of the OC-3 left over for other uses. In a couple days you'll have all the warez and pr0n you'll ever need.
-Dan
On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 03:15:47PM -0400, Jon Lewis wrote:
Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it was of questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet feed with no binaries?
Jon, I recall some reported problems along those lines. That even without binaries, they were running out of overhead. Given that USENET volume tends to grow, I'm betting that it would require a lot more capacity now.
When I first talked to someone using SkyCache about 5 years ago, at the time, they were a very happy customer because they'd been able to offload 12-13 Mbit/s from one of their transit DS-3s by taking a SkyCache feed.
However, that was late 1999 or so, and transit prices were more than an order of magnitude higher than they are now. In those days, a lot of SPs were still running their own newsservers, and very few companies were providing outsourced reader access to news.
These days, it doesn't make a lot of sense for many SPs to deal with the hassle of taking feeds and maintaining a newsserver, so they outsource reader access for their 4 or 5 customers who are aware that there is something besides the WWW out there.
SkyCache was a really nice idea, but given that the number of SPs running their own newsservers has shrunk considerably, and that the outsourced news people won't be interested, the market is much smaller overall. On top of that, the bandwidth requirements have increased, while transit cost has plummeted. As a service, it existed to mitigate the bandwidth requirements of running a newsserver -- now that transit costs have crashed, and many more people are outsourcing their news, I just don't see a viable market in providing push feeds over satellite. I don't know what transponder space is running, but I'm willing to bet it has not gotten much (if any) cheaper.
--msa
--
<Zaren> Christ almighty... my EYES! They're melting!
-Zaren, Efnet #macintosh, in response to:
www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/1944 The WEBSITE DESIGN class that gave my fiancee a D.
--------Dan Mahoney-------- Techie, Sysadmin, WebGeek Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC ICQ: 13735144 AIM: LarpGM Site: http://www.gushi.org ---------------------------
On Mon, Sep 20, 2004, Matthew Crocker wrote:
First, you go out and buy the biggest server you can find, buy more drive space than you can afford. Then, buy more. You *may* be able to get a feed from your upstream service providers. You'll want to have at least 2 feeds and you should have at least OC-3 to each provider to handle the feeds. Don't expect much of the OC-3 left over for other uses. In a couple days you'll have all the warez and pr0n you'll ever need.
No you won't. You'll be searching for a CD ISO and find 798/800 parts. The other two were 'missed' because you didn't give it enough bandwidth and the upstream expired the article before you could get to it. Adrian, glad his news server(s) don't have to carry alt.binaries. -- Adrian Chadd "You don't have a TV? Then what's <adrian@creative.net.au> all your furniture pointing at?"
On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 07:54:09PM -0400, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
Assuming I wanted to go about setting up an NNTP server, how would I go about getting and maintaining the feeds? There's no "central" authority AFAIK, but does anyone have any knowledge as to relative price and/or bandwidth consumption?
You get a feed mostly by knowing someone who gives it to you. Sometimes knowing somebody who knows somebody else who can give it to you also works. More hops are generally a problem. Bandwidth consumption strongly depends on what newsgroups you will be having on your newsserver. On a small local hierarchy the 9600Bd Modem might still do. For a full feed >100Mbit/s are needed. Nils
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Majdi Abbas wrote:
Jon, I recall some reported problems along those lines. That even without binaries, they were running out of overhead. Given that USENET volume tends to grow, I'm betting that it would require a lot more capacity now.
We were customers up until some months before they folded...and even though we canceled about the same time they tried to "jack up" the monthly rates (I think our take it or leave us rate increase was 3x), we were kept on their mailing lists...so we kept getting notifications from them. "Sorry guys, we're going out of business. Oh wait, no we're not. Hmm...yeah, we are." IIRC, we were getting regular complaints from a handful of users about incomplete multipart posts and groups missing articles...I know, different versions of the same problem. We were also busting at the seams of our drive space and chose to outsource rather than build an even bigger server. AFAIK, we still have one or more dishes and several receivers kicking around somewhere. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Rick Chavez wrote:
Does anyone know of one?
Hell, has anyone even considered starting one?
For that matter, would anyone be interested or willing to pay for their services if someone did or is bandwidth so cheap that it's just not needed anymore?
People still use usenet? ;) Seriously though, you'd have to be an awfully large organization for outsourced news to not be a slam dunk financially. Andy --- Andy Dills Xecunet, Inc. www.xecu.net 301-682-9972 ---
Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:
People still use usenet? ;)
yes.
Seriously though, you'd have to be an awfully large organization for outsourced news to not be a slam dunk financially.
Perhaps, but Panix runs their own; one of the many reasons they get my money. {And damn little of it compared to the benefits..} -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
participants (12)
-
Adrian Chadd -
Andrew - Supernews -
Andy Dills -
Dan Mahoney, System Admin -
David Lesher -
jason＠dixongroup.net -
Jay Hennigan -
Jon Lewis -
Majdi Abbas -
Matthew Crocker -
Nils Ketelsen -
Rick Chavez