SkyCache/Cidera replacement?

Tue Sep 21 01:53:54 UTC 2004

On Sep 20, 2004, at 7:54 PM, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:

>
> On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Majdi Abbas wrote:
>
> I'll bite, and reveal my ultimate cluelessness here.
>
> Assuming I wanted to go about setting up an NNTP server, how would I 
> go about getting and maintaining the feeds?  There's no "central" 
> authority AFAIK, but does anyone have any knowledge as to relative 
> price and/or bandwidth consumption?
>

First, you go out and buy the biggest server you can find,  buy more 
drive space than you can afford.  Then,  buy more.  You *may* be able 
to get a feed from your upstream service providers.  You'll want to 
have at least 2 feeds and you should have at least OC-3 to each 
provider to handle the feeds.  Don't expect much of the OC-3 left over 
for other uses.  In a couple days you'll have all the warez and pr0n 
you'll ever need.

> -Dan
>
>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 03:15:47PM -0400, Jon Lewis wrote:
>>> Hadn't it gotten to the point shortly before Cidera folded that the
>>> satellite bandwidth was so insufficient for a "full feed" that it 
>>> was of
>>> questionable value?...or was it still fine if you wanted a usenet 
>>> feed
>>> with no binaries?
>>
>> 	Jon, I recall some reported problems along those lines.  That
>> even without binaries, they were running out of overhead.  Given that
>> USENET volume tends to grow, I'm betting that it would require a lot
>> more capacity now.
>>
>> 	When I first talked to someone using SkyCache about 5 years ago,
>> at the time, they were a very happy customer because they'd been able
>> to offload 12-13 Mbit/s from one of their transit DS-3s by taking a
>> SkyCache feed.
>>
>> 	However, that was late 1999 or so, and transit prices were
>> more than an order of magnitude higher than they are now.  In those
>> days, a lot of SPs were still running their own newsservers, and very
>> few companies were providing outsourced reader access to news.
>>
>> 	These days, it doesn't make a lot of sense for many SPs to
>> deal with the hassle of taking feeds and maintaining a newsserver,
>> so they outsource reader access for their 4 or 5 customers who are
>> aware that there is something besides the WWW out there.
>>
>> 	SkyCache was a really nice idea, but given that the number
>> of SPs running their own newsservers has shrunk considerably, and
>> that the outsourced news people won't be interested, the market is
>> much smaller overall.  On top of that, the bandwidth requirements
>> have increased, while transit cost has plummeted.  As a service,
>> it existed to mitigate the bandwidth requirements of running a
>> newsserver -- now that transit costs have crashed, and many more
>> people are outsourcing their news, I just don't see a viable
>> market in providing push feeds over satellite.  I don't know what
>> transponder space is running, but I'm willing to bet it has not
>> gotten much (if any) cheaper.
>>
>> 	--msa
>>
>
> --
>
> <Zaren> Christ almighty...  my EYES!  They're melting!
>
> -Zaren, Efnet #macintosh, in response to:
>
> www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Classroom/1944
> The WEBSITE DESIGN class that gave my fiancee a D.
>
> --------Dan Mahoney--------
> Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
> Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
> ICQ: 13735144   AIM: LarpGM
> Site:  http://www.gushi.org
> ---------------------------
>