Is it Me?
Charlie Trotta
before IDT goes down for the count? The future holds lots of revenue
and potential for companies who value customers and don't just "seize
the moment". Get a business clue!
Johan Kullstam
i've already left. i'm just waiting for my pre-paid time to run out.
bad as you might think idt is, mediaone is worse. mediaone has a
crappy newsserver and effectively no support -- they send reports of
no problems and smoothing sailing in the face of the most obvious
calamities. the only thing they've got going for them is raw speed.
i hope idt look into xdsl service. if they can get close in price and
speed to cablemodem, i would return.
imho idt's biggest problem is that they never tell you anything about
changes in your service. i've had dial-up numbers change on me,
accounts move from one machine to another. shell-access (i started
with pure-shell access as all i had at the time was a dumb terminal
and a modem) changing into ppp and then no more shell account.
i was rather irked to have shell-account access suddenly stopped with
no warning or opportunity to download any files i had stored there.
available storage on the server for files and mail going up and down.
they don't even bother to inform you of good news.
it's not like i expect someone to show up to my door, but an email
with information a day or so in advance would have been nice.
on the other hand, the irc support team has always been very willing
to help. at least in my dealing with them, they *always* double check
any reports of problems and do not try to deny or whitewash
difficulties. i can have a large amount of patience if i am not being
fed lies. kudos to the idt irc people.
the newsserver has been idt's strong point. under len rose it was
fairly solid. but more important than the service, was len rose
posting messages about problems and solutions during the on-going
battle with providing that news service. even on days where news was
not doing well, having len post that he knew there was a problem and
that he was working on fixing it gave comfort. because of his
forthrightness and attention to customers, len was a hero here in this
newsgroup -- even and yeah especially during the bad times of broken
news service.
idt deal straight with your customers. when you do, people will
support you and remain loyal. when things go on behind users back and
there is no warning or information forthcoming or worst outright
denial, then users will look elsewhere.
--
Johan Kullstam [joh...@idt.net] Don't Fear the Penguin!
idiot
I'm more than ready to move to another ISP and newserver.
So where are all the wise people going to for better service? What's the
best ISP? Who has the best newserver? Which ones retain binaries for more
than one or two days? Last thing I want to do is go to a place worse than
this!
Idiot at idt
(reply to ios.general)
Moonman
ruined the whole fucking thing. a full feed that has decent retention
(5 days) would take a tera byte at the least maybe 2 there really is a
lot of info out there considering 36000 plus groups.and while an isp
may put a huge bank of hard drives for the storage the machine that
was trying to keep up with that much would just pump its guts out
getting new messages and expiring old ones, it would never have time
to send out anything to the people who want the info. I have tried
everyone (well close to everyone) all of the news servers are
censored. or thier feed is crappy or their retention is 2 days or they
carry one but not the other of a news group I want or they have a
limit on the size of posts usually less than a meg for a post, which
just kills the warez groups and multimedia groups.
On Fri, 15 Jan 1999 21:58:10 -0800, idiot4...@idt.net (idiot)
wrote:
Flare
BTW, here is a link to the set-up of the usenet server farm at IDT,
circa the Len Rose administration: :)
<http://www.netsys.com/images/nntp-public.gif>
and the user farm:
<http://www.netsys.com/images/serverfarm.gif>
Regards,
Moonman wrote:
<SNIP>
> ...the machine that
> was trying to keep up with that much would just pump its guts out
> getting new messages and expiring old ones, it would never have time
> to send out anything to the people who want the info....
Moonman
not a pro in computers, but I think that there are just too many posts
to usenet for the current tech to keep up with. On all of those
machines there is no way to filter out spam? like on my cheap news
reader? Maybe filter anything posted to more than 3 or 4 groups at a
time? My news reader, Agent, will do that.
On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 22:52:14 -0500, Flare <jgur...@no.spam.idt.net>
wrote:
Flare
You're probably right. :-|
Would the current news admin like to comment on the current
configuration of the news farm?
Regards,
Flare
poptop wrote:
<SNIP>
> Divide that by 10 and you probably have the current setup.
Flare
storage. I've seen 25 Gig drives for sale for aprox. $5000. Using
RAID 5.....
5 * 25 = 100 Gig ~ $25,000
*10 *10
--- -------
50 drives~ 1 Tera ~ $250,000 for drives
*2 if you want RAID 10 (mirroring)
--------
100 drives $500,000
->100,000
Caching |--------
RAID cont. $10,000 |$600,000
>---------------------------------
*10 | |
------- | |
$100,000-- |
|
What does a Sun Ultra IIi quad proc. go for? I think ~$250,000 |
*10 |
-------- |
$2,500,000
|
+ 600,000<-
----------
Just for disk storage~ $3,100,000
Add together the expensive networking equipment and, the I'm sure
Quite high priced salery of the person who administers it, and I bet
you've spent close to 10 mil.
I bet it would work though.
Just some food for thought. (if this kind of thing interests anyone)
Regards,
Flare
poptop wrote:
<SNIP>
> You don't go from having 4 days retention to 2 days in overnight
> unless you raided one of the disk arrays.
Johan Kullstam
> Flare <jgur...@no.spam.idt.net>'s keyboard strokes were:
>
> <Snipped $10,000,000 news farm>
> >
> >I bet it would work though.
> >
> >Just some food for thought. (if this kind of thing interests anyone)
> >
> >Regards,
> >
> >Flare
>
> hehehe...but I bet you would get what...seven or eight days
> retention...:)
what if you dropped the binary groups?
newsgroups makes for a remarkably poor method for distributing
binaries. it's all in some bloating ascii encoding format. it goes
out and occupies disk space all over the world. i am not for
censorship, but clearly news is the wrong medium for this stuff. a
different method needs to be created since the need/desire is out
there.
eejack
<Snipped $10,000,000 news farm>
>
>I bet it would work though.
>
>Just some food for thought. (if this kind of thing interests anyone)
>
>Regards,
>
>Flare
hehehe...but I bet you would get what...seven or eight days
retention...:)
EEjack
WebCircle Design Services ... www.webcircle.com
Baseball Quote of the Day ... quote.webcircle.com
Moonman
the only reason I bought a computer in the first place.
On 19 Jan 1999 21:19:16 -0500, Johan Kullstam <joh...@idt.net> wrote:
>eej...@webcircle.com (eejack) writes:
>
>> Flare <jgur...@no.spam.idt.net>'s keyboard strokes were:
>>
>> <Snipped $10,000,000 news farm>
>> >
>> >I bet it would work though.
>> >
>
Johan Kullstam
> What if you dropped everything exept for the binary groups. They are
> the only reason I bought a computer in the first place.
you seemed to have entirely missed my point. newsgroups are for text.
we do not want to eliminate the binaries, just distribute them on a
channel more suitable to the.
> On 19 Jan 1999 21:19:16 -0500, Johan Kullstam <joh...@idt.net> wrote:
>
> >eej...@webcircle.com (eejack) writes:
> >
> >> Flare <jgur...@no.spam.idt.net>'s keyboard strokes were:
> >>
> >> <Snipped $10,000,000 news farm>
> >> >
> >> >I bet it would work though.
> >> >
> >
> >what if you dropped the binary groups?
> >
> >newsgroups makes for a remarkably poor method for distributing
> >binaries. it's all in some bloating ascii encoding format. it goes
> >out and occupies disk space all over the world. i am not for
> >censorship, but clearly news is the wrong medium for this stuff. a
> >different method needs to be created since the need/desire is out
> >there.
>
--
Johan Kullstam
> On 20 Jan 1999 19:03:25 -0500, Johan Kullstam <joh...@idt.net> wrote:
> >we do not want to eliminate the binaries, just distribute them on a
> >channel more suitable to the.
>
> Who is the "WE" ?
it's the royal we. ;-)
seriously, that was an oversight. sorry about that.
> Sure the 43% seems like a lot. Truth is, there would be substantially
> more overhead if you decoded these binaries and changed the transport
> to http or ftp. It's a fact, jack.
for one thing, having the files stored and transmitted as raw binaries
would help by about 20-30% depending on ascii-ification method. this
might be accomplished by some extension of the news protocol, or it
might be through a new protocol altogether. the existance of worse
protocols (http, ftp, uucp, a station-wagon full of datas tapes &c) is
a red herring and irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Flare
Do it in reverse for the binary groups.
Binarfication of the req's.
...something called Usenet2...
Well anyways, I wish I could think of something
that would actually work.
Regards,
Flare
jgur...@nospam.idt.net
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Johan Kullstam wrote:
<SNIP>
> for one thing, having the files stored and transmitted as raw binaries
> would help by about 20-30% depending on ascii-ification method. this
> might be accomplished by some extension of the news protocol, or it
> might be through a new protocol altogether.
<SNIP>
Moonman
would be on it . Binaries. Dirty pics, Dirty Movie mpgs, Bootleg
Mp3s, Pirated software ... did I forget anything? It would never
happen. More likely they will just stop carrying the good NGs.
On Thu, 21 Jan 1999 00:57:39 -0500, Flare <jgur...@no.spam.idt.net>
wrote: