Reducing Usenet Bandwidth

Sat Feb 2 20:36:04 UTC 2002

On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:

> bandwidth in/out. That produces about 300Gb per day of which only a small
> fraction ever gets downloaded.
>
> The question is, and apologies if I am behind the times, I'm not an expert
> on news... how is it possible to reduce bandwidth used occupied by news:

Abolish all binary posts / binaries groups.  IMO, posting binaries to
usenet is a throw back to the days of low speed networks and few people
having the capability to put up their own FTP/HTTP accessible files.

These days, it's just abused as a free warez network and free porn
hosting/advertising.  How else can you send MS Office or 100MB of porn
jpegs or mgegs to thousands of people for basically free[1]?

[1] at least it's free to the poster....not to the networks that keep
having to build ridiculously larger news servers.  The first news server I
ran for an ISP had 4GB...and that was for the OS and articles.  The most
recent has 18GB for OS, 288GB for articles...and it's obviously obsolete
if others are accepting 300GB/day.  When are the operators going to draw
the line and say "no more" to binaries?

-- 
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 Jon Lewis *jlewis at lewis.org*|  I route
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