Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!me!radio.astro!helios!root
From: root@helios.toronto.edu (Operator)
Newsgroups: tor.news
Subject: Re: How to become a UUCP site
Message-ID: <772@helios.toronto.edu>
Date: 14 Apr 89 16:08:35 GMT
References: <9140@watcgl.waterloo.edu> <1989Apr10.163124.516@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: sysruth@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Ruth Milner)
Organization: University of Toronto Physics/Astronomy/CITA
Lines: 35

In article <1989Apr10.163124.516@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:

>2. Ample resources.  Usenet news is VERY voluminous, often running two
>   megabytes a *day*.  To store even a week's news (a reasonably typical
>   choice), you will need a fair bit of disk space.  Processing incoming
>   news can be a noticeable load, too.

A full feed (i.e. all ~500 newsgroups) is currently running much higher than
this. The only groups we keep for longer than a week are very low-volume (the
ut groups and news.announce.newusers). Everything else is kept for 7 days,
and /usr/spool/news has over 45MB used at the moment. This translates into
something over 5 MB/day (divide this by 2400 baud and you'll see why a fast
modem is needed).

You can, of course, opt for only a partial feed (although the commonest
groups, being the most popular, are generally the largest in volume), and
you can determine yourself how long you wish to keep old articles. Before
we got a new disk in January and set up a large partition just for news,
we kept things for only 2 days, and it ran anywhere from 7-10MB. 

Keep in mind, also, that you may need extra space to accommodate new,
incoming articles prior to expiring old ones, depending how you arrange
the timing. 

The USEnet news, of course, is optional. You don't need it to communicate
with other sites on UUCP (or even other networks once you know the gateways).
But it is very nice to have. The technical groups are *extremely* helpful.

Enjoy!

-- 
 Ruth Milner          UUCP - {uunet,pyramid}!utai!helios.physics!sysruth
 Systems Manager      BITNET - sysruth@utorphys
 U. of Toronto        INTERNET - sysruth@helios.physics.utoronto.ca
  Physics/Astronomy/CITA Computing Consortium