In article ,
Harold and Susan Vordos wrote:
"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...
[ ... ]
*Which* service provider? Usenet is hosted on hundreds or
thousands of systems around the world. There is no *one* service
provider to say yea or nea.
Thanks, DoN. Still, I have one question that troubles me. Is anyone in
charge of RCM?
No! Since it is in one of the "big eight" heirarchies (rec,
news, comp, sci, talk, soc, humanities and misc), there is a specified
way to go about getting a newsgroup created. In others, there are other
ways, but the big eight (which are officially all of usenet -- the rest
(like alt) sort of ride along).
Why does it exist?
Because some people cared enough to go through the hoops needed
to form the newsgroup. It starts with posting a RFD (Request For
Discussion) in news.groups. Then there is a discussion period, in which
people thrash out what the charter should be, and other details, such as
"should this newsgroup be moderated?" -- defending them against people
who say "Who needs yet another newsgroup, what you want to talk about
can be covered in x.y.x?". (As it turns out, rec.crafts.metalworking
was one of the early newsgroups which tried the "trial" newsgroup
heirarchy first. That allows people to test it, with a restricted
distribution.)
Once the RFD period is over, there is then posted a CFV (Call
For Votes), in which everybody in the discussion period, and anyone else
who cares, is free to submit a vote. There is a regular number of
people who vote against *any* new newsgroup. There must be a minimum of
100 votes, and the "yeas" must be a 2/3s majority. (If there are fewer
than 100 votes, it is presumed that there is not sufficient interest.)
The submission of the CFV is done by a set of regulars who help
guide the proponents of the newsgroup through the process. I think that
even the RFD call needs a "mentor" these days as well.
When one posts, or reads posts that
come from RCM, is there any one place where it is all on a hard drive
(besides Google)?
How about "not even Google"? Google honors the "X-No-Archive: "
header, so the articles will not even stick around there.
Each article starts its life by being posted to some news
server. I run my own, so I can tailor things like the expire time for
newsgroups which I particularly care about. Once it is posted, it
is placed in the local server's news spool directory. The server also
queues copies to be passed to one or more "upstream" sites. These also
store copies in their news spools, and pass them on to many other sites.
They branch out around the world, and come back together via various
paths, so any news site may receive multiple copies of a given article.
This is one of the uses of the "Message-ID: " header. A database of
recently received articles is stored by "Message-ID: ", and if the
server has already a record of having received the article, the new copy
is discarded. Since many of the connections between servers are
one-way, this explains why the answer sometimes comes in before the
question. The answer can come more directly than the question.
Each server gets to specify its own expire time on a per
newsgroup basis. The retention time of the entries it the database of
"Message-ID: "s is also a local choice, so it is possible that the
record of receipt may be cleared before a later copy arrives, so you can
see it twice.
Each server also gets to specify which newsgroups it will carry.
I carry some of the rec.crafts newsgroups, some of the "news.admin"
newsgroups, some of the "comp.sys.*" newsgroups, and some of the
comp.unix.* newsgroups. I carry almost no "alt.*" newsgroups, with the
exception of alt.folklore.computers and alt.machines.cnc. And each
server gets to specify which newsgroups it is willing to feed to other
servers, so a local newsgroup heirarchy can exist. I have one. Most
ISPs with news servers have one. And these are seldom fed outside of
the local server.
At one time, when Fidonet was being gatewayed to usenet, some of
the gateways were re-writing the "Message-ID: " and the "From: " headers
as well, so second (and sometimes third and fourth) copies of your
articles would appear -- except that instead of (in my case
", I would appear as ".
Really -- the "control" of usenet is a cooperative anarchy.
Nobody can enforce rules on another server -- though a majority can vote
to "shun" with a UDP (Usenet Death Policy) if the provocation is great
enough.
I trust by now you understand I'm totally confused as
to how the entire thing works.
Justifiably so. It is complex, and sort of "just grew". All
the information is out there, but you have to dig to find it.
Someone, somewhere, one fine day must have
decided there should be an entity known as RCM------how did it come into
being?
The RFD and CFV process described at the beginning of this
message.
Does anyone have the authority to restrict anyone from posting?
Any news server can restrict who can post using *that* news
server. Mine is set up so nobody from outside can post. I do have
provisions so a friend can post, by connecting to my system, and
passing the article via a rather uncommon protocol once logged in.
Can I assume it's nothing more than an address where everyone meets, but
there isn't any such place?
Sort of -- there is no such place, but it is everywhere. :-) (Or
at least, everywhere that there are news servers who carry this
particular newsgroup. You don't need to know a central address (such as
a web site has), but rather you need to access one (or more) of the many
news servers around the world.
I might liken it to a directory (on many, if
not all servers), under which anyone has access and adds their comments.
Something like that?
Sort of. Each newsgroup is actually a subdirectory on each
server (with the path varying with the version of the news server
software). An example is the path on my server of rec.crafts.metalworking.
/usr/local-5/news/spool/articles/rec/crafts/metalworking
another newsgroup on my server is:
/usr/local-5/news/spool/articles/rec/music/makers/squeezebox
Note that the first part is the same on all:
/usr/local-5/news/spool/articles/
and the rest is the newsgroup name with the '.'s replaced by '/' (the
unix subdirectory separator, which Microsoft sort of copied, using '\',
because they already had '/' tied up as the option switch flag.
As for how usenet got started -- it started with a mailing list,
back when the total number of interconnected systems made that
practical. Then it grew to a heirarchy, with the first word being "net"
(e.g. net.talk, net.comp, net.soc). Things grew and grew, and there
have been many versions of the software through the years. When I first
started my server, "b-news" was being replaced with "c-news", which I
used. I later upgraded to various others, ending with a version of
"inn" (InterNetNews).
I hope that this is some help.
BTW I just got the cut style knurler today -- and haven't yet had
a chance to get to the shop and try it out. It is a cute little
one which I should even be able to use on my little
Compact-5/CNC without any problems.
Enjoy,
DoN.
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