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Re: [leafnode-list] Demon News Servers



On 30-Nov-2000 Carl Inglis wrote:
>> Please check if your Demon news server supports that, the INN
>> installation suggests that NEWNEWS be disabled since it draws
>> tremendous amounts of I/O and CPU resources, so NEWNEWS might be a
>> clean solution that is however not really widely supported.
> 
> Returned "500 command unknown"

I'm rather surprised by this. From memory, one of the primary reasons for
Demon writing NewsBorg was to provide an efficient implementation of NEWNEWS.
Indeed, if you check out http://www.ragnet.demon.co.uk/mynews/news.html, you
will find a sample session:

     Connected to news.news.demon.net
     news.demon.co.uk NewsBorg [nnrp-04]
     help follows
       ARTICLE [<num>|<id>]
       BODY [<num>|<id>]
       DATE
       GROUP <group>  HEAD [<num>|<id>]
       HELP
       IHAVE <id>  LAST
       LIST [<schema>]
       LISTGROUP [<group>]
       MODE READER
       NEWGROUPS yymmdd hhmmss [GMT]
       NEWNEWS <groups> yymmdd hhmmss [GMT]
       NEXT
       POST
       QUIT
       RATING <rating-service>  SLAVE
       STAT [<num>|<id>]
       XHDR <header> [<range>|<id>]
       XOVER [<range>]

     Contact <newsmaster@xxxxxxxxx> for further information

Can you try the test again, but this time issue a 'MODE READER' before trying
'NEWNEWS'? NewsBorg absolutely, definitely, supported NEWNEWS when I was a
Demon customer.

By way of explanation of the oddity that is NewsBorg to those outside the UK,
Demon was the first dial-up ISP in the UK, starting operations in June 1992.
There wasn't really at the time a clear model for providing dial-up IP, so
Demon did what seemed sensible to them at the time - attempt to behave as if
each customer was a regular Net host, merely one that was only intermittently
connected. So, dial-up customers got (and still get) static IP by default, mail
delivery via SMTP (a SMTP delivery session is triggered on dial-in), 'site'
email (i.e. your are <anyname>@<customer>.demon.co.uk, a scheme now standard in
the UK but less common elsewhere), and so forth. Their initial customer
software package (for non-Unix) was a collection of DOS software based around
KA9Q. The news system on that used NEWNEWS. As their customer base grew, the
incessant pounding of NEWNEWS requests into INN bogged them down, so rather
than try and get their customer base to change their software they wrote
NewsBorg to efficiently support NEWNEWS as the primary news gathering
mechanism.

I left Demon earlier this year after deciding that their purchase by Scottish
Telecom wasn't going to sort the management problems they seem to have had. It
could well be somebody has ordered NEWNEWS turned off for some reason, but I do
doubt it.

I agree that the missing articles problem is a bit crap. That being said, I
used to use suck for getting news from Demon, and never hit this problem. Or
rather, thinking about it, I think suck handles gaps. Hmmm. Bugger. Better add
improving dealing with it to the list of things to do on Noffle. :-)

Demon used to operate public access news servers on pubnews.demon.co.uk and
pubnews.demon.nl. They still exist, and are mentioned in the FAQ at
http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/faq/config.shtml#news - I just can't get into
them right now. I don't know if they use NewsBorg too; if they did, and one
could get into them, it would make testing practical. I suppose the major
problem is going to be distinguishing articles that haven't arrived from those
not available because they have been cancelled. A Demon customer is need to do
some experimentation - for example, if you get the list of articles to read
with XHDR, does it produce a list with gaps, and hence you might silently miss
articles?

> Oh well, I'll use the -x as a workaround for now till I find a better 
> server. I need to keep Demon for the Demon specific 
> announcement groups, but that's not a major problem, there's so 
> few messages in there.

Demon does propagate demon.* groups offsite, so you might be able to find the
groups you want on other servers. You can definitely find demon.service on
DejaNews, though aggravatingly they don't seem to have demon.announce.

-- 
Jim Hague - jim.hague@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Work), jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Play)
Never trust a computer you can't lift.

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