Just linking to a copy of the Boardwatch article entitled “Usenet news servers - the simple version” that was published in October 1997.

It’s fun… Today Usenet is growing towards 1TB/day and the typical Usenet service provider has 4PB of spool per site.

I’ve run News servers back into the Sun 3/50 and Telebit days, and I helped people configure ATT Unix PCs. I think I may have had a few groups coming in to a System 3 box back in 1996 but it may just have been UUCP for email, I can’t actually recall.

And the interesting thing about it is - Usenet has always been one of the best/easiest ways to stress hardware, software, and network infrastructure. Which makes it fun as a hobby scaling challenge.

Coming soon (as I write this intro in 2010) is an article on one of the first times I had seen a major infrastructure optimization solution - the introduction of cyclic spools to Usenet in the 1990s.

The complete list of articles that I wrote for Boardwatch are linked to in the sidebar on this site…