Alternative Satellite news feed needed

Thu Oct 2 19:55:18 UTC 2003

> Only complaints I had about their service before I left were they
> wouldn't offer a filter before transmission service. It would have cut
> down on the transmit load and saved some time for my news server if they
> were filtering before it got to me.

I think they couldn't do this because it was a broadcast transmission, and
not point to point.  Any pre-transmission filter would be applied to
everyone.

> It was extremely nice to take the NNTP load off of our upstream links when
> we first set it up. As I understood it, they were not doing well on binary
> feeds towards the end there though.

I think they ended up filtering posts over a certain length over a year
ago (?).  They were approaching 45-50MBit/s, and when they implemented
that filter they cut it back to about 30.  Not exactly a full feed, but
how much porn do you actually need? :)

We ended up supplementing their feed with a text-only feed from one of our
upstreams, just to make sure we weren't missing anything that someone
might actually care about (i.e. non-porn).

Adam Maloney
Systems Administrator
Sihope Communications