I volunteer my time to administer the news servers at The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa, mostly because after GeoVision shut down it was my main place to read news. After the last minor crisis in the news servers (caused by the regular sysadmins adding a new modem pool and a new netblock without telling me), somebody was bitching and moaning about how the news administrator doesn’t live in Ottawa, and therefore doesn’t attend meetings and “doesn’t really know what’s going on at NCF these days”. And it was pointed out that the reason the NCF doesn’t have a news administrator who lives in Ottawa and goes to meetings is that nobody wants the job, and every time I try to quit the entire board of directors and half the members beg me to stay. So somebody asked what it would take to become a news administrator. What follows is a list I quickly wrote off the top of my head.
- You need to know how to install, configure, and run news server software, preferably INN because that’s what we currently use.
- You need to know how to write NCF specific patches to the news server software to authenticate users, and to do the required editing of the From line. You’ll need to be able to write code that works right the first time and every time under high load, mostly in C and perl.
- You need to know how to negotiate newsfeeds with peers, and how to set up to give and recieve newsfeeds.
- You need to know how to deal with spam, and keep the existing spam filters up to date.
- You have to be able to tell the difference between a legitimate newgroup/rmgroup command and a fake one, and what to do with each one.
- You need to deal with user requests for newsgroups to be added, and how to monitor that request afterwards to make sure it was a real newsgroup.
- You need to juggle the wants of the users and the limitations on disk space to decide how long to keep articles in newsgroups from expiring.
- You need to deal with user complaints and questions. (The most common questions are “Why was my article <foo> cancelled”, and “Why don’t you do anything about the guy who keeps posting <foo>”. Other questions will mostly be about specific news reading clients, and I don’t deal with those.)
- You need to read ncf.admin and ncf.help, because most people don’t email you about problems, but instead just bitch about it.
- You need have to be alert to when NCF adds a new net block, because the news authentication system gives local users more privileges than ones
coming in from another ISP. And nobody will bother to tell you when it happens. - You need to participate in ONAG, and answer email from people. Unfortunately the ONAG mailing list is a major source of spam, so you’ll
need a good spam filter. - You need to keep up with what’s going on in the world of Usenet by reading some of the news.admin newsgroups, especially news.admin.technical. It also wouldn’t hurt if you were to also follow the inn-bugs and other INN
mailing lists.
And as your reward, you’ll be villified and lied about by assholes and idiots.
Let me know when you want to take over.