Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org> wrote:
> For the scenerio of running a private netnews network, it'd probably
> make the most sense to just use NNTP over TCP/IP. Again, the "in
> network" servers would have to only allow traffic between themselves.
> Maybe, we could gateway in some of the better groups from the regular
> Usenet hierarchy, and then create a vunet.* (or whatever) hierarchy
> which is only carried within the network.
If you want to run a private netnews network, you just set up another
hierarchy and control who you feed that hierarchy to. This is pretty
much transport-independent and you can use either NNTP or UUCP to do
the feeding. You can also run it in parallel with less-private
netnews feeds (e.g. Big 8, alt, geographic hierarchies, Usenet II) and
even exchange feeds for the less-private traffic with hosts that don't
have anything to do with the private netnews hierarchy.
The difficult bit is keeping it private. It's way too easy for a
site's admin to set up a new feed of everything to a site that might
not be welcome at the party, and about the only recourse that the rest
of the private network has is to stop feeding the loosely administered
site if its admin won't fix the leak. It is also hard to detect
outgoing leaks if they do not permit posts to leak in.
One rule that you must have is: no cross-posts to groups inside and
outside the private hierarchy (e.g. cross-posting to
alt.folklore.computers and vunet.classiccmp is not to be done and
preferably not to be allowed). It is generally suggested that you set
up the feed for the private hierarchy as a separate feed (separate
lines in the newsfeeds file, if you're running INN) so that this rule
can be enforced.
It might be worth looking at
http://www.usenet2.org/ and the links
there as something of a how-to.
> But now we're not talking about vintage computers or software. We're
> talking about vintage values--where there's a global network with the
> intent to further education, research, collaboration, and general
> discussion (pointless or otherwise). Personally, I'm sick of the over
> commercialized monstrosity that the internet has become.
Yes, you really should go look at
http://www.usenet2.org/ . Consider
that the plan was to have a viable alternative when Usenet became
unusable, which was expected to happen but didn't (hasn't yet).
Usenet II exists but is not really used today.
-Frank McConnell
Received on Sat Feb 09 2002 - 21:41:57 GMT