Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!microsoft!stevesc
From: stevesc@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Schonberger)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Boston public access unix?
Message-ID: <9375@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 8 Dec 89 04:49:36 GMT
References: <7183@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <3014@uceng.UC.EDU>
Reply-To: stevesc@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Schonberger)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 45

>In article <7183@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, jwz@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Jamie Zawinski) writes:
>>One of my friends in Boston has had a taste of netnews and wants more; anyone
>> know of either 1: an inexpensive site that would give him access to news, or

In article <3014@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>The public-access usenet sites have their own newsgroup hierarchy. 
>Check pubnet.nixpub for a listing of all known sites. If your site
>does not carry this group, I'll mail you the latest listing.

This is good advice.  I got on to a public access site where I used to
live when I was asked to stop carrying non-technical newsgroups on my
site by looking through the nixpub list.  That site was free.  Others
in that area were all very inexpensive.

>Starting your own site is not really out of the question, if you have
>about $5k to spend (386 AT clone with 4 MB RAM + >120 MB disk), UNIX

Now this is not such useful information.  It's quite wrong.  I run a
site of my own at home that I have less than $500 invested in.  I had
it running for a while on a $400 dual-floppy XT clone running DOS and
UUPC.  Although two 360K floppies were not enough space for me to take
a news feed comfortably, I could have done it if I kept the feed
small.  Mail ran perfectly well on the dual-floppy system, and I
didn't come close to running out of space.  I since added a disk for
about $80 (a controller at a discount store and a 10-meg drive that a
friend gave me after upgrading), which gave me enough space for what
is a _lot_ of news for one person.  If all I had on it was mail and
news, it would still be almost empty.

Setting up the UUPC software was simple.  I expaneded the UUPC ARC
file, created directories as advised in the readme file, and arranged
my mail and news feeds.  My first link's uucp login script took some
work to set up, but the other ones were pretty much like the readme
suggested.

Being a mail and uucp guru is helpful for having your own site, but
not necessary.  Having a $5000 system to run it on is nice, but not
necessary.  It can be done easily enough for $500, a few hours study,
and some help from the administrators of the sites you'll be linked
to.  A lot of sites welcome links, and some even make it a point of
pride to supply as many mail links as they can.

-- 
	Steve Schonberger	microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net
	"Working under pressure is the sugar that we crave" --A. Lamb