You'll need somewhere to get the news from to have a suck feed or a
normal news feed, if you intend to carry outside newsgroups.
As I mentioned, the most affordable way to carry a full news feed is via
a satellite provider who does a satellite multicast of a full feed 24
hours a day. That's about $400/month, and is available from Cidera and
a few other companies (some ISPs and carriers qualify to receive it free
from Akamai...though this is a very slow rollout, and probably not
something your environment would qualify for--if you haven't already
been approached by Akamai, then you probably don't have the size to
qualify).
To do a suck feed, you only need a low cost news account with one of the
many news outsourcing companies and permission to do a daily suck for
the groups you want (they usually bill based on number of active
clients, or based on bandwidth usage). A list of some of those
providers is here:
http://www.cybernothing.org/isp/outsource-news.html
This list includes Randori, which is the one Bev's friend Diane
mentioned, I think. I have no direct familiarity with any of them, or
the cost of their services.
Another good option, as I mentioned, is to just get an account with one
of those providers...and then use NewsCache in front. It will then
/appear/ that you have a local news server, and will also reduce your
reliance on the outside news server by some small amount each month
(lowering your bill and your news bandwidth needs). You can also use
NewsCache to serve for a separate local news server...and consolidate
the two (the outsourced nntp service for the 'real' newsgroups, and your
local news server for your private newsgroups). This will allow your
users to only connect to one server for both local and outside groups
without having to have separate configurations. Again, this will appear
to users as though you have a full feed since they can grab anything
from the outside server, and will also provide access to local groups
from the same server. Pretty cool stuff, and a recent area of interest
for me.
NewsCache is here:
http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/NewsCache/
It's very easy to setup, and maintain, and works much more simply than
INND or even Dnews for most environments. I also have a GPL NewsCache
Webmin module in development that should be ready in another three weeks
or so.
Looking briefly at pricing for some of those outsourced news providers,
if you only have one or two people reading at any given time, you can
probably get access to a full feed for around $10-$20/month. This is a
whole lot cheaper than doing it yourself, eh? Again, I don't really
have any recommendations here, but I deal with ISP techs every day and
I've heard good things about ABS, Giga-News, and the previously
mentioned Randori. I'll be trying out several over the next few months
to decide which one we want to partner/co-market with for our news
caching services--so I welcome anyone's feedback on such things
(off-list, of course, since we're a bit off-topic here).
Hope this helps. Good luck! (And let me know if you need news server
or news cache hardware. We're offering very good deals during our early
testing...we haven't officially begun selling them to the public yet.)
Ben Kennish wrote:
> Thanks for all the advice Joe and Bev.
>
> I'm using dnews but I'm a little confused as to this 'suck feed'
> business. We don't have an ISP news server so I fail to see how I can
> set the nttp_feeder variable.
>
> Thanks,
>
> ---
> Ben Kennish
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Joe Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Affordable Web Caching Proxy Appliances
http://www.swelltech.com
