Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
From: doug-merritt@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: I wanna be a leaf too
Message-ID: <6425@cup.portal.com>
Date: 11 Jun 88 19:30:44 GMT
References: <1542@edison.GE.COM> <55774@sun.uucp>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 41
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.4407

Chuck McManis wrote an excellent article about what one needs to do
in order to run news, chock full of handy hints.

He also said:
>You say, "Oh I just want to get comp.sys.amiga
>and a couple of other groups." Then the answer is "Oh you only need 20
>to 40 megabytes of hard disk *with nothing else on it*" This is not to
>discourage anyone, just to let them understand that you *must* have a
>hard disk to receive news, period. 

This is the *right* way to do it. That's not to say that a determined
person cannot have a floppy-based Amiga as a net leaf. It's just that
there would be continual nuisances involved. You would probably have to
put two fresh diskettes in your drives every day (or night), so that your
limited newsfeed would have 1.76 meg (880K x 2) to work with. That's enough
for at least a *few* groups per day, like, say, all of the Amiga newsgroups.

There might be times when it wasn't enough, and you might have to receive the
remainder the next day with new floppies, etc. A pain.
But then again, maybe not...I think that the average daily traffic for a
full feed is around 5 megabytes per day (up from 3 megabytes not long ago). So
1.7 meg is a large percentage. I haven't figured it out, but it *might* even
be enough for comp.* (excluding non-Amiga binaries), sci.* and news.*.

Don't forget, by the way, that every site should receive news.announce.
newusers, which has zero traffic except at the start of the month, when
it has a bunch all at once. You also may want some of the net administration
newsgroups. These "extra" but important groups contribute to the load.

Of course, the news programs themselves will subtract from the 1.76Meg
total.

There's a series of documents written about the net that you will want.
One set is the one that appears monthly in news.announce.newusers. Another
is the set that is distributed with 'rn'; they give lots of info that
will be useful to anyone who is trying to do a non-rn news system.
	Doug
--
      Doug Merritt        ucbvax!sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
                      or  ucbvax!eris!doug (doug@eris.berkeley.edu)
                      or  ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug