News Feed Information
Late-breaking news
New newsfeeds (as opposed to changes to existing feeds) are now being provided by the Verio news servers. Please contact us at news@news.new-york.net for more information.
If you just want to read news and don't want a newsfeed, please use the Verio news server ny.news.verio.net.
Please be sure to allow the New York Net news servers to have at least NNTP xfer access to your news machine. Currently there are 5 news servers: news.new-york.net and news2 through news5.new-york.net. Your feed may originate from any one of these servers, so please make sure access is granted to all of them. This is done by editing your "nntp_access" file (B/C news + NNTP), your "hosts.nntp" file (INN), or your "diablo.hosts" file (Diablo). Note that INN has a "feature" which will cause it to ignore host names in the hosts.nntp file if it can't contact a name server when INN starts. You may want to list the IP addresses of our news servers in the hosts.nntp file as well. C News and Diablo do not have this problem. We may move your newsfeed between our servers to optimize performance, so please list all 5 servers.
Also, please note that all of the New York Net news servers put "news.new-york.net" in the Path: header. Please make sure you don't offer our news back to us due to this.
When you feed articles back to us, you should use IHAVE (this is the NNTP default) or CHECK/TAKETHIS (streaming NNTP) rather than POST, and you should feed to news.new-york.net regardless of which host we use to feed your site. Please note that POST is a client-to-server protocol, while IHAVE and CHECK/TAKETHIS are used between servers. news.new-york.net refuses articles sent via POST.
We will hold a backlog queue of between 100,000 to 200,000 news articles for your site to accomodate temporary problems with your news server or network. If the queue to your site grows beyond this size, we will trim it. This prevents us from offering you stale articles and articles we no longer have, and lets your queue attempt to catch up. When we first configure your newsfeed, we will monitor the performance and let you know if you're falling behind. If we notice a drastic change in your performance, we will also let you know. If your newsfeed comes from news.new-york.net or news4.new-york.net you can view your queue information (and other statistics) here. If your newsfeed comes from news3.new-york.net, the registered customer contact for news will receive flush messages which explain how to retrieve the other statistics. We will be replacing this flush message method with web-based statistics in the future.
Installing and supporting a news server is not an easy task. A full newsfeed places considerable demands on both the system and the news administrator. As of this writing (May, 1999) a full newsfeed is about 500,000 to 650,000 articles per day (not counting another 200,000 or so which are spam) and is about 25 gigabytes per day. This is a sustained news transfer rate to your server of approximately 2.2 megabits per second (that's about 1.5 T1's worth of bandwidth, which means that a full newsfeed will require you to dedicate two T1's just for news). A feed that excludes binaries and less-common hierarchies is much more reasonable, at about 1 gigabyte/day and an average transfer rate of about 100 kilobits per second. You can view the statistics for the last month here.
news2.new-york.net accepts up to 16 simultaneous newsreader connections from each customer, so if you only want to read a few groups or don't want to carry a full news spool locally, you can just point your newsreader there and not return the newsfeed request form. You can always change your mind later and request a feed. Note that news2 is a "convenience" server and has a rather short retention period for articles. Sites which require longer retention times should either run a local news server and obtain a newsfeed from us, or consider one of the outsourcing news servers now available on the Internet.
You could also obtain a caching NNTP server such as nntpcache and install it on your server. The caching server acts like a regular NNTP server to your users, but makes a single connection to news2.new-york.net to obtain only the articles your customers want to read.
In order to establish your news feed, we need to ask a few questions. Please complete this questionnaire as soon as possible. When your application is processed, we will send you email confirming your feed, as well as a copy of your newsfeed definition. For future changes, please edit this definition as desired and return it via email to news@news.new-york.net rather than submitting another copy of this form.
Please allow an average of 5 working days for processing.
