I decided that part of the reason for my home server’s pitiful upload performance is all that bandwidth being consumed by usenet news peers and news readers. Every time I look at “netstat –inet”, there are at least a dozen nntp connections, incoming and outgoing. I decided the simple solution to that would be to move the news server to my colo box – that way the only nntp connections on my poor overworked cable modem would be Vicki and I connecting it out to the colo box, and everybody else would hit my well under-utilized colo bandwidth. As a side effect, with all the bandwidth and disk space available there, I could start taking all the big8 and alt groups that I don’t currently take. Maybe I could even start offering accounts to more people.
Sunday night I installed inn2 on the colo box, and started feeding it from my home and from the National Capital Freenet. After a day, it appeared that that was working perfectly, so I informed my various peers to start feeding directly to the new site (news.xcski.com). Some of them have switched over, some haven’t. As a reader, it seems a tiny bit slower than a local connection, but it’s probably way faster for remote readers.
After another day, it’s been working so well that now it’s time to tell the various readers to switch over. Unfortunately I never collected the email addresses of all the readers. In recent years I’ve started suggesting that they subscribe to an internal newsgroup called “compass.announce”, but I’m not sure how many are doing that. I guess I’ll have to give them some time to notice, and then shut off the server on the home box.
So if you’ve got news read/post access on my news server, please switch over to using news.xcski.com as your server name. Your userid and password should still work. If your news reader uses .newsrc or something similar, you’re going to have to reset all your article counts because I started numbering at 0 again.