Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut!karl
From: karl@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: How long are you keeping news these days?
Message-ID: <3899@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 88 02:59:40 GMT
Sender: karl@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Lines: 21

I'm rather curious.  With the high volume of news, we haven't got the
space to keep a whole lot of news for a long time.  We keep most news
less than a week, except for local newsgroups which we keep for as
long as a month.  (The traffic in those groups isn't even a drop in
the bucket compared to the general Usenet traffic.)  On the 3B2 we use
as a UUCP gateway, whose sole purpose is news transfer and mail
passing, we keep news for about 10 days.  I'm using another 3B2 in my
basement as a backup for the regular gateway machine, in case it
decides to collapse under the load; I can bring the backup in to drop
in the original's place in about 10 minutes, just change his name,
update his sys file and away he goes.  This backup (`loquat') keeps
news for 14 days.

I'd like to know, though, how this compares with what other sites are
doing.  How long do you keep news?  What policies do you keep for
expiring some groups fast and other groups slowly?  How much space do
you allow for Usenet?  How full do you let it get?  We have a 30Mb
partition that runs 60-70% full most of the time.

Comments?

Karl