All things related to multicast

["Joe St Sauver" <>]

Dale commented:

#My first thought would be to set up a standalone, dedicated NNTP
#infrastructure.

FWIW, "back in the day" (as the Old Man is fond of saying on the 
popular TV show "Pawn Stars"), some Usenet admins often were fond 
of saying, "Feed me everything." (FWIW, I never was one of those 
guys)

Thus, when UO began experimentally working with the unidata.* 
hierarchy with UCAR, I explicitly checked with my peer admins (many 
of whom were of the "feed me everything" philosophical ilk) to 
confirm, "Hey, are you *sure* you really want to even get a whole 
pile of binary weather data? I'm not sure that's really your customer 
niche, is it?"

"Heh heh. Yep, go for it, Joe, no prob-lem-o. We carry EVERYTHING."

Okay, so I didn't bang that hierarchy out of their feeds. My remote 
peers added the new unidata.* groups they began to see, and we fed them 
traffic for those groups. A LOT of traffic.

In turn, other sites, fed by my direct peers, also noticed the new high 
volume newsgroups, and just blindly added them, and began to carry and 
propagate that traffic. 

Now back in those days, spool retention times were measured in 
just days, and soon readers began to notice that the "more popular"
binary newsgroups suddenly didn't have the retention that they once did,
as the content they were interested in began to get displaced by other
stuff.

At the same time, some of them noticed that their provider was suddenly 
receiving and offering a large volume of weather data.

Predictably, customer voices were heard, and listened to.

And thus, you now know the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey used
to say) about why some of the largest Usenet specialty service 
providers on the Internet, providers that pride themselves on
carrying and feeding *everything* that's available (except things 
like identifiable child exploitation materials), have a feed spec 
that specifically reads, "*,!unidata.*" (e.g., everything EXCEPT 
for the unidata.* hierarchy :-)) For example, see
http://www.giganews.com/peering.html

So trust me when I tell you that Usenet can push a LOT of weather 
data, even by Usenet standards. :-)

Regards,

Joe