HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: news@MathWorks.COM (Usenet News Account)
Newsgroups: news.admin.policy
Subject: Mailing -- Breech of USENET Etiquette
Date: 26 Jan 93 18:38:21 GMT
Organization: The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA


	A few users at my site complained to me last week about
receiving an unsolicited, obviously commercial mailing from a certain
Michael Mesaros (mesaros@isi.com).  After doing some checking, the
only commonality I was able to determine among the various usernames
was that all had appeared on the recent news.groups posting listing
all those who voted on the creation of the comp.soft-sys.matlab
newsgroup.

	Use of this post to gather names for such unsolicited mailings
strikes me as an obvious abuse of USENET as a non-commercial entity.
If people knew that voting for a newsgroup would cause their mailbox
to be flooded by junk mail, it might discourage people from taking
part in the voting process -- something that I'm sure the USENET
community does not want.

	I have sent e-mail to the postmaster at ISI about this, with
unsatisfactory results.  My question to this group is: Is it just me,
or do other people feel that this is a breech of netiquette?


				-Dave

--
Dave Henry				
Postmaster, News Admin, Network Manager	
The MathWorks, Inc.			# EMAIL: beast@MathWorks.COM
Natick, MA, USA				# VOICE: +1 508 653 2452, x322
From: geoffb@coos.dartmouth.edu (Thumper)
Newsgroups: news.admin.policy
Subject: Re: Mailing -- Breech of USENET Etiquette
Date: 26 Jan 93 21:29:50 GMT
Reply-To: geoffb@Dartmouth.EDU
Organization: Amos Tuck School
Disclaimer: I don't represent Dartmouth and Dartmouth doesn't represent me.

In <C1H53y.9J5@MathWorks.COM> news@MathWorks.COM (Usenet News Account) writes:

>	I have sent e-mail to the postmaster at ISI about this, with
>unsatisfactory results.  My question to this group is: Is it just me,
>or do other people feel that this is a breech of netiquette?

Using a vote tally as the basis of a mailing list certainly strikes me as
an abuse of the net. But it would be very hard to prove that someone had
done something like that. In general I'm bothered by any unsolicited email
but most of that kind of stuff comes from within my own site.

-Geoff
--
geoffb@Dartmouth.EDU - Computing Support Consultant, Tuck School of Business
_____________________________________________________________________________
Cerebus for Dictator in 1993!! | "One less mouth to feed is one less mouth
    "Vote for me or else."     |  to feed" - Cerebus (as the Eastern Pontiff)
From: jerry@olivea.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Re: To compress or not to compress?
Date: 25 Jan 1993 19:12:41 -0500
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino CA, USA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

In article <1k18fcINN274@ftp.UU.NET> tom_limoncelli@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:
>I expected it to be better to off-load the dirty work to the modem,
>since my Sun3 is so slow.  However, I found that the 2x bytes going
>through the serial port slowed things down worse than running
>"compress" on the Sun3.

I have measured the CPU used and running compress actually saves cycles
because later uuxqt and uucico have half the data to process.  The time
saved copying, checksumming and servicing interups is slightly more than
that used by the compress program.

That was for sending.  On receive the savings should be even greater
as receiving typically results in more interupts and uncompress uses
less cycles than compress.
From: Christophe.Wolfhugel@grasp.insa-lyon.fr (Christophe Wolfhugel)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Re: Setting up a news server (nntp): hardware, software, people
Date: 25 Jan 1993 13:59:55 -0500
Organization: INSA Informatique (GRASP), Lyon, France
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

In article <1jpbvlINNsa@ftp.UU.NET> courcoul@vmtecqro.qro.itesm.mx (Juan M. Courcoul) writes:
>* Of the two machines on which to run it, which would be the best
>  candidate, in terms of handling the load ? 

Speaking of CPU, most modern stations have enough to handle a full
feed, and even more.  The points you need to check is first if the
station will have other duties and how important they will be
(speaking of load).

Speed of disk IO is also an important deal.  This changes a lot from
system to system.
 
>* What amount of disk space would you recommend to set aside, if we plan
>  to keep the articles for a week, on the average ?

This is also fully system depending. The main point to look at (with
today's one file per article) is the block size.  The more it is
important, the more you'll waste your disk space.

My monthly study (posted to news.lists) indicates that with a 4 Kb 
blocking factor you waste over 50% of disk space whereas with a 512 byte
blocking factor it's only a little bit over 10%.

This means that for storing 500 Mb of articles you'll need between 
600-700 Mb up to 1.4 Gb.
 
>* Which software would you recommend ? 

I would recommend using INN. Easy to install and operate.
But that's an opinion. Others might not share it.

-- 
Christophe Wolfhugel    |    Email: Christophe.Wolfhugel@grasp.insa-lyon.fr
  "IBM France's high quality rs6k hardware service:  (thanks you ECA-015)"
  "  before, it seems to work...  after,  crash-blurps-noreboot-yellow-button"
From: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp (Chiaki Ishikawa)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Re: Help: Limiting News to a group
Date: 22 Jan 1993 12:46:01 -0500
Organization: Personal Media Corp., Tokyo Japan
Distribution: world
Reply-To: personal-media.co.jp!ishikawa@pmcgw.UUCP
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

Actually, this is a "me, too" question with a twist.

In my case, I am asked to provide service two set of user groups.

Required conditions are 

(1) One user group should be able to access ALL newsgroups.
    (There is no problem to do this, of course. This is the standard
    environemnet).

(2) The other group is allowed to access only one newsgroup hierarchy (and
    its subhirarchy).
    This is the tricky part.

I am using NNTP (+Bnews), and NNTP version of inews, rn, etc..

Is there any good way to do this?
If I don't use NNTP, I suppose I could put group permission on the
news spool directory. But I am not sure if that is feasible using NNTP
access.

Any tips are welcome.

 Chiaki Ishikawa,  Personal Media Corp.,  MY Bldg, 1-7-7 Hiratsuka,
 Shinagawa, Tokyo 142, JAPAN. FAX:+81-3-5702-0359, Phone:+81-3-5702-0351
 UUNET: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp
From: news@gvc.com (News Administrator)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: To compress or not to compress?
Date: 24 Jan 1993 21:40:31 -0500
Organization: Not officially GeoVision Systems Inc., Ottawa, Ontario
Distribution: world
Reply-To: PTomblin@gvc.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

My feed site has always complained about the low modem throughput he gets
from my site, as opposed to some of the other sites he feeds.  I always
blamed it on the creaky old Sun3 we use as our news machine, and on the
heavy system load.  So I took some measures to try and reduce the odds of
uuxqt, doexpire and newsrun running _while_ I'm loading from my feedsite.
It hasn't improved things much, if at all.

Then this other site that I've just started feeding mentioned that I'm
letting our modems negotiate compression, and that's a no-no when you're
uucping compressed files.  Has anybody done any comparisons of the total
throughput of compressed versus uncompressed files on a compressed versus
uncompressed modem connection?  Measuring bytes/second over the modem isn't
enough - since compression will mean fewer bytes have to go, but possibly
each byte will go slower.

I'm most interested in hard data on PEP, TurboPEP and V32bis/V42bis.

-- 
The Anonymous News Administrator (if you need to know, you already know)
I just administer the news, I don't make or state policy.
From: msb@sq.com (Mark Brader)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Re: Scanning out the "For your newsgroups file:" line
Date: 25 Jan 1993 12:45:00 -0500
Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

[Side note: the article to which this is a followup had "Followup-To:
news.admin.misc", even though the topic is technical, and there was
no explanation of this in the text.  I hope this was simply an error
by the original poster, which the moderator didn't notice.]

> Last week I posted an inquiry for a piece of sed or other code that
> would give me the line FOLLOWING the "For your newsgroups file:" line...
> I figured that it would be a simple one liner or so ...

And so it is, if you use awk rather than sed.  In new awk:

	awk '/^For your newsgroups file:/ {getline; print; exit}'

In old awk, I believe it takes two lines:

	awk '/^For your newsgroups file:/ {hit = NR+1}
	     NR == hit {print; exit}'
-- 
Mark Brader, Toronto		sed -e "s;??\\([-=(/)'<!>]\\);?\\\\?\\1;g"
utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com	will fix them...	-- Karl Heuer

This article is in the public domain.
From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Re: To compress or not to compress?
Date: 28 Jan 1993 15:47:49 -0500
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net


In article <1k1vlpINNi7u@ftp.UU.NET> jerry@olivea.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>In article <1k18fcINN274@ftp.UU.NET> tom_limoncelli@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:
>>I expected it to be better to off-load the dirty work to the modem,
>>since my Sun3 is so slow.  However, I found that the 2x bytes going
>>through the serial port slowed things down worse than running
>>"compress" on the Sun3.

>I have measured the CPU used and running compress actually saves cycles
>because later uuxqt and uucico have half the data to process.  The time
>saved copying, checksumming and servicing interups is slightly more than
>that used by the compress program.

>That was for sending.  On receive the savings should be even greater
>as receiving typically results in more interupts and uncompress uses
>less cycles than compress.

Furthermore, my tests have shown that some of the compression modes
used by modems seem to kill uucp protocol g throughput.  On large,
plain ASCII files, with my ZyXEL V32bis/V42bis modem, I get around
550 cps with MNP5 on, and 1000cps with MNP5 off.  Remember that since
this has no host-based compress either way, it means that the same
file takes almost twice as long to transfer with MNP5 on - and since
it's probably optimal for compression, precompressed data could only
be even worse thru MNP5.  This appears to be due to packetization
used by MNP5 interfering with g protocol's packetization.  My tests
have also shown that V42bis doesn't seem to make much difference from
no compression at all (ie: still around 1000cps), tho this may be more
an artifact of my DTE speed.

I seem to get optimal throughput with MNP4 and MNP5 disabled.
V42bis doesn't seem to make any difference.

One of my feeds is a Sun3, and I routinely get 1100 CPS on large compressed
files - he is using a ZyXEL too.
-- 
Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
Psroff 3.0 info: psroff-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
Ferret list: ferret-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
From: ta2321s@dunix.drake.edu (Terry Asher alias -       The Penguin)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Accounting daemon
Date: 25 Jan 1993 12:56:26 -0500
Organization: Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, USA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

	I am the system administrator and I was wondering if there was a way
from Unix to run a daemon from rc.local that will keep a record of both the
number of times that Usenet is accessed and which newsgroups are being
accessed.  Our Unix is a DEC 5000 Workstation which is connected to our
VAX 4600 mainframe.  Our VAX runs ANU-News so the daemon would have to catch
anybody accessing Usenet through ANU-News as well as the normal way through
trn.  Sa might be what I need, but how do I massage it to get just these
vital statistics.
From: courcoul@vmtecqro.qro.itesm.mx (Juan M. Courcoul)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Setting up a news server (nntp): hardware, software, people
Date: 22 Jan 1993 12:47:33 -0500
Organization: Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Queretaro
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

Having recently gotten a MicroVAX 3100 up and running with Ultrix 4.3,
and waiting for an IBM RS/6000-320H to arrive (hopefully, with the
latest AIX), I would like to set up a news host for our local academic
community. However, being mostly ignorant of the administrative side
of news, I'd like to ask for your expert opinions.
 
* Of the two machines on which to run it, which would be the best
  candidate, in terms of handling the load ? I would probably get a feed
  from another nearby campus and receive 1,200-1,300 groups, and have to
  serve 600-800 users daily, approx.
 
* What amount of disk space would you recommend to set aside, if we plan
  to keep the articles for a week, on the average ?
 
* Which software would you recommend ? The VAX already has the stock
  code that comes with the Ultrix shipment, but I have no objection to
  using other code.
 
Perhaps I should mention that we would like to be able to read the news
directly from our PC's, using Trumpet or other similar news readers.
Also, our VM users will use Paul Campbell's NNR/VM.
 
Thanks in advance for any information.
 
 
Juan M. Courcoul                            COURCOUL@VMTECQRO.QRO.ITESM.MX
Monterrey Tech.                             COURCOUL@VMTECQR2.QRO.ITESM.MX
Queretaro Campus                            courcoul@itesmcq1.qro.itesm.mx
From: tom_limoncelli@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Re: To compress or not to compress?
Date: 25 Jan 1993 12:36:44 -0500
Organization: Mentor Graphics -- IC Group
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

In <1jvjuvINN8l6@ftp.UU.NET> news@gvc.com (News Administrator) writes:

> [ modem compression on or off for news? ]

>I'm most interested in hard data on PEP, TurboPEP and V32bis/V42bis.

I run a Sun3 news system at home.  Here's what I discovered:

Compressing a compressed file results in a 50% slow-down.  Why?
Because compression is not magic, it is the removal of entropy and once
you remove all of the entropy you can't remove any more.
[ How's that for over-simplying a very difficult mathematical concept? ]

(BTW, I knew that was going to be the result but I was trying to figure
out if PEP would automatically shut off compression if the compression
ratio was really bad.  It doesn't.  Maybe TurboPEP does? ]

So, who should lead us to the question, "So, should my Sun3 do the
compression or should I leave it up to my modem?"

I expected it to be better to off-load the dirty work to the modem,
since my Sun3 is so slow.  However, I found that the 2x bytes going
through the serial port slowed things down worse than running
"compress" on the Sun3.

That's my view.  Your mileage may vary.

Tom
-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal@warren.mentorg.com (work) -- tal@plts.uucp (play)

Unix is a trademark of, WHATT????
From: jxxl@taurus.cs.nps.navy.mil (John Locke)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: C News Posting w/ Sun OS
Date: 25 Jan 1993 21:31:48 -0500
Organization: CS Dept
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net

This is a weird one. I have Pnews talking to the nntpd which calls on the
C news subsystem to inject a local post. My posts were disappearing
into the chain of Bourne shell scripts and not returning any error
messages. I traced the failure to this line in injnews:

	pnews /tmp/in$$ <$input >$censart

The syntax is fine. pnews creates stdout with cat and/or echo, but it goes
nowhere. $censart is created but receives no data. Extracting the case
into two simplified scripts fails to reproduce the error. So it seems that
the Bourne shell is failing for some set of conditions. It's the shell
with Sun OS 4.1.1. Has anyone else had this problem?

I have a temporary solution which has pnews output to /tmp/filename.
injnews then uses that name instead of $censart. Not a perfect answer,
since it creates a race condition for near-simultaneous posters. Does
anyone have any suggestions, or is this between me and Sun?

Thanks.
John
From: ggw@wolves.Durham.NC.US (Gregory G. Woodbury)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical
Subject: Scanning out the "For your newsgroups file:" line
Followup-To: news.admin.misc
Date: 24 Jan 1993 21:40:57 -0500
Organization: Wolves Den UNIX
Distribution: world
Reply-To: ggw@wolves.durham.nc.us
NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net
Summary: INN does it

Last week I posted an inquiry for a piece of sed or other code that
would give me the line FOLLOWING the "For your newsgroups file:" line
that David Lawrence (tale@uunet.uu.net) and other place in the newgroup
messages for NetNews.

I figured that it would be a simple one liner or so, but it turns out to
be a rather subtle bit of code.

All three of the responses I got are basically the same bit of code from
the INN newgroup script.  Two are from the released versions, and David
sent the latest and greatest from uunet.

John Schmitz answered first with:
	>From duke!dtc.hp.com!schmitz%scd.hp.com  Mon Jan 18 15:36:03 1993
	>Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1993 10:36:47 -0800
	>From: John Schmitz <duke!dtc.hp.com!schmitz%scd.hp.com>

${SED} <${ARTICLE} >>${NEWSGROUPS} -n -e '
        :top
        /^For your newsgroups file:$/b print
        n;b top
        :print
        n;p;q'

Then David Lawrence sent this version:
	>From duke!uunet.uu.net!tale  Mon Jan 18 22:51:35 1993
	>From: duke!uunet.uu.net!tale (David C Lawrence)
	>Date: Mon, 18 Jan 93 17:00:27 -0500

This is how INN does it:

${SED} <${ARTICLE} >>${NEWSGROUPS} -n -e "
:top
/^For your newsgroups file:\$/b scan
n
b top
:scan
n
/$1[    ]/ {
p
q
}
b scan"

And finally Ken Sallenger sent this (edited) comment and code fragment.
	>From duke!animal.csd.scarolina.edu!ken  Thu Jan 21 15:36:53 1993
	>Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 15:08:42 EST
	>From: Ken Sallenger <duke!animal.csd.scarolina.edu!ken>

I append a fragment from the INN newgroup script.  It's not that
simple (for me at least).  I had to read the sed(1) man page
very carefully, several times, to be sure I understood this one!

The comment is mine; the GNU sed that I was using made a real
hash out of the end of our newsgroups file, so I switched back
to /bin/sed.

==== INN code courtesy of Rich Salz, INN version 1.2 ====
# USC-kws Tue Dec 22 15:47:27 EST 1992
#
#  Substituting /bin/sed for GNU sed, as we get bad results.
#  Specifically, printing was *on* from BOF to the newsgroups line,
#  the line prints OK, then OK (i.e. no printing) to EOF.
#
case $WORD in
created)
    /bin/sed <${ARTICLE} >>${NEWSGROUPS} -n -e '
        :top
        /^For your newsgroups file:$/b print
        n;b top
        :print
        n;p;q'
    ;;
esac

My thanks to the respondents, and to Rich Salz (the presumed author of
the code in question.)
-- 
Gregory G. Woodbury @ The Wolves Den UNIX, Durham NC  <Standard disclaimers>
UUCP: ...dukcds!wolves!ggw   ...duke!wolves!ggw           [use the maps!]
Domain: ggw@wolves.Durham.NC.US  ggw%wolves@duke.cs.duke.edu
[This site is *not* affiliated with Duke University.  (Idiots!) ]
Xref: sparky news.admin:8814 news.sysadmin:1608 news.software.readers:2925
From: meyer@darkwing.uoregon.edu (David M. Meyer 503/346-1747)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,news.software.readers
Subject: PC news readers and the number of newsgroups...
Date: 26 Jan 93 19:53:08 GMT
Organization: University Network Services, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
	97403
NNTP-Posting-Host: darkwing.uoregon.edu


	We seem to be in a not so atypical situation. We have
	users that use trumpet to read news on PCs. The problem
	we face is that trumpet seems to die if there are more
	than about 3500 news groups (we have about 4500).

	What do most sites do about this? Run a different PC news
	reader? Don't run a PC news reader? Carry less news?

	This last alternative is thorney...Who decides what is
	(is not) carried...


	Thanks 

	Dave

	David M. Meyer			Voice:     503/346-1747
	Senior Network Engineer		Pager:	   503/342-9458
	Office of University Computing	FAX:	   503/346-4397
	Computing Center		Internet:  meyer@ns.uoregon.edu
	University of Oregon
	1225 Kincaid
	Eugene, OR 97403
From: geoffb@coos.dartmouth.edu (Geoff Bronner)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: rec.arts.startrek.reviews moderated and proposed rec.arts.startrek split
Date: 24 Jan 93 15:45:04 GMT
Reply-To: geoffb@Dartmouth.EDU
Distribution: na
Organization: Amos Tuck School
Disclaimer: I don't represent Dartmouth and Dartmouth doesn't represent me.

In <1993Jan23.080716.23448@cbfsb.cb.att.com> forbes@cbnewsf.cb.att.com (Scott Forbes) writes:

>I think the article-by-article analysis posted here recently shows that
>the volume of *on-topic* traffic in r.a.s.current is not The Problem.
>The Problem is the amount of r.a.s.current traffic that should be in
>r.a.s.misc, but isn't.

And, I think, it can be argued that a chunk of the traffic in .current and
.misc also properly belong in .tech and .fandom.

-Geoff
--
geoffb@Dartmouth.EDU - Computing Support Consultant, Tuck School of Business
_____________________________________________________________________________
 Cerebus for Dictator in 1993!!    | "Responsibility is when someone can
     "Vote for me or else."        |  blame you if something goes wrong."
From: harvey@indyvax.iupui.edu
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: s.r.christian.bible-study
Date: 21 Jan 93 14:54:58 -0500
Organization: Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis

In article <1jmcmvINN3f1@umbc8.umbc.edu>, ac999266@umbc.edu (ac999266) writes:
> ksdavis@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Karleen S. Davis) writes:
>
>>Well, I personally feel excluded by its movement into the .christian
>>hierarchy.  Yet, I feel my ideas on the interpretation of the Bible
>>(in a spiritual context or otherwise) are just as valid as anyone
>
>>crashing a party.  I see no reason for the name of the group to state
>>something contrary to the charter.  If the newsgroup is open to people
>>from all backgrounds, I say let the name agree with that ideal.
>
> ALL newsgroups are open to ALL people.  Period.  Are you
>  claiming that men are not allowed to read soc.women?
>  The discussion will be ABOUT the Christian Bible, but
>  it is NOT restricted to the Christian point of view.
>  The namespace is not meant to exclude people, it is
>  meant to explain what topics the group will cover.

I disagree.  The charter for the group explains what topics the group covers.

> The newsgroup should be in the .christian hierarchy
>  because it is NOT about the Hacker's bible, the Satanic
>  bible, or any other such book called a bible.  It is
>  about the broad category of works that people call the
>[rest of message lost?]

It is about the study of the broad category of books that people call the
Bible, so it should be called soc.religion.bible-study.  The group will be
moderated, and I seriously doubt that any significant amount of the moderator's
time will be spent rejecting articles about Hacker's and Satanic bibles.
If you feel that this will not be the case, please elaborate.

Keep the soc.religion hierarchy flat unless there are exceptionally good
reasons not to.  This isn't a good reason IMHO.
--
James Harvey
harvey@iupui.edu  uucp:iugate!harvey  bitnet:harvey@indyvax
Newsgroups: news.groups