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Advice for Sys admins and ISPs on managing rapidly growing Usenet in O'Reilly's latest - "Managing Usenet"

January 20, 1998

SEBASTOPOL, CA--The world's largest discussion forum, Usenet, is doubling in size every year. There are Usenet discussion groups on every imaginable topic, from the technical to the political to the truly bizarre and arcane. If you simply read Usenet postings, all of this discussion can be entertaining. But if you're a system administrator who has to set up and run a Netnews system (the set of standards and software underlying Usenet), you suddenly have the unenviable task of making sure that your system can handle a data flow of thousands of megabytes.

Managing Usenet, written by two of the foremost authorities on Usenet administration, gives system administrators and Internet service providers concrete advice-until now, largely undocumented-on setting up and handling a news system.

Managing Usenet covers C News and INN, the two most widely used news relayers on UNIX systems. It explains, step-by-step, the basics of starting a Netnews system, from getting a news feed, to building and installing the news software, to keeping everything running smoothly. It covers critical information for running everything from a single news server inside your organization to complicated systems with multiple servers, several incoming news feeds, and multiple outgoing feeds to outside hosts. Managing Usenet also offers guidelines to help you make sure that your system is capable of handling news volume today-and in the future.

About the Authors

Henry Spencer ran the first Usenet site in Canada (and the first outside the US), which was part of the Usenet "backbone" in its early days. He co-wrote C News, one of the two major software packages for network news transport and storage. He worked on a first draft of the replacement for RFC 1036, which defines the format and protocols of network news. He was involved in the early definition of CANet (the Canadian National Research Network). He lives in Toronto, Canada.

David Lawrence has been the moderator of news.announce.newgroups, the clearinghouse for the creation of new mainstream newsgroups, since February 1991. He spent five years as the news system administrator for UUNET Technologies and recently took a position with the Internet Software Consortium, where he can concentrate on programming freely available software for the Internet community. His current Usenet responsibilities include maintenance of the mainstream newsgroup namespace and management of the worldwide database of newsgroup moderators. He lives in Underhill Center, VT.

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Managing Usenet
By Henry Spencer & David Lawrence
1st Edition January 1998 (US)
508 pages, 1-56592-198-4, $32.95 (US$)

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