Xref: utzoo news.admin:7747 news.groups:14951 comp.mail.uucp:3787 comp.os.vms:19891 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!cblpf!mark From: mark@cblpf.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups,comp.mail.uucp,comp.os.vms Subject: Re: New newsgroup hierarchy Message-ID: <11685@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 22 Nov 89 20:21:19 GMT References: <1618.25614348@mccall.uucp> <49454@looking.on.ca> Sender: nntp@cbnews.ATT.COM Reply-To: mark@cblpf.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus Lines: 60 In article <49454@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: >In article wayne@dsndata.uucp (Wayne Schlitt) writes: >>if every operating system/computer started its own hierarchy, this >>would lead to very fragmented net. each of those separate nets would >>be much smaller... if ultrix, msdos, sun etc all broke off separate >>nets, what would this do the usenet as a whole? > >What is so bad about this? The net is too big to manage as it is. Why >distribute stuff where it's not wanted? Why not have smaller subnets? >I'm all for it. Brad is absolutely right. Netnews traffic has reached 8 MB/day, and it's doubling every year. It was not long ago that most ordinary sites kept 2 weeks of traffic on the disk. Now, even though our charter is to provide Netnews service, we can only fit about 10 days worth on a disk and still have enough breathing room for fits and bursts. (We're investigating creative solutions to this.) There are two reasons why traffic is growing so rapidly. One is that the number of people on the net is growing rapidly. The other is that new newgroups are being created at an alarming rate. Reading news.announce.newgroups it's clear that nearly every country in the world is taking a vote on a soc.culture.* group, and there are zillions of other groups being voted on. Without exception, there are only a handfull of "no" votes, and it's trivial to get a 100 vote "yes" margin. I proposed that rule years ago when it made sense, but it's a joke now. If someone wanted to create rec.humor.mud-wrestling, I'm sure it wouldn't be hard. Greg Woods has proposed requireing a 2/3 majority to create new newsgroups. This is clearly a step in the right direction, and I've voted "yes" on it. However, it doesn't go nearly far enough. I think it should be a lot harder to create a mainstream Usenet group. Perhaps it should be shown that enough people would *read* it to justify deleting some less-read group from the bottom of the list. VMSNET is not without precedent. There has been a unix-pc.* net for years now. It's not bothering anybody. Neither will VMSNET. Furthermore, objecting to the creation of VMSNET is blatant censorship: you're telling somebody else what they can do with their own machines! It's akin to forbidding a small group from publishing their own magazine or newsletter. By the very nature of the alternate heirarchy, you won't carry it unless you ask for it. Alternate heirarchies are an important way of keeping the Usenet .newsrc files down to a finite length. Right now a typical .newsrc file is about 16K bytes. For our 7000 users, the .newsrc and .oldnewsrc files add up to over 200 megabytes of disk space, all of which needs to be backed up. NNTP reads the active file over the net before rrn can start up - this would take 5 seconds on an idle 56K trunk. When the trunks get loaded at lunchtime, we sometimes get reports of taking a minute or more to start up rrn! I think it's unlikely our users will want VMSNET (this being AT&T, we run UNIX on our mainframes!) so this simplifies things for us. I strongly support the use of alternate heirarchies such as VMSNET, and I fail to see how anyone can oppose them in good faith. Mark Horton Usenet Old-Timer