Usenet, also called Netnews, is the world's largest discussion forum and it is doubling in size every year. There are Usenet discussion groups on every imaginable topic, from the technical and scientific, to the political and religious, and onto the truly bizarre and arcane. If you simply use the Netnews system, all of this discussion can be interesting and entertaining. But if you're a system administrator who has to set up and run a Netnews system, you suddenly have the unenviable task of making sure that your system can handle a data flow of thousands of megabytes per day. Unfortunately, Usenet administration is one area of network administration that is still learned primarily by word-of-mouth and Internet folklore. That is, until now.
This book, written by two of the foremost authorities on Usenet administration, is full of practical information about how to set up and run a news system. Managing Usenet covers C News and INN, the two most widely used news relayers on UNIX systems. It explains the basics of starting a Netnews system, from getting a news feed, to building and installing the news software, to keeping everything running smoothly. Managing Usenet also offers guidelines to help you make sure that your system is capable of handling news volume today and in the future. This book contains everything you need to know to administer a Netnews system, from a single news server inside your organization to a complicated system with multiple servers, several incoming news feeds, and outgoing feeds to a number of other hosts as well.
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animals featured on the cover of Managing Usenet are domestic fowl. Chickens have been domesticated for at least 4000 years. Nearly all of the ancient civilizations kept domestic fowl. There are currently approximately 150 breeds of domestic fowl. Selective breeding has led to the development of fowl with a variety of body types, colors, skull features, feather density, and tail feather length. Today chickens are raised primarily for egg and meat production. Wild fowl live in small flocks in which a pecking order becomes established among both hens and roosters. Rank fights begin when chicks are only a few weeks old. Until relatively recently most domestic fowl lived in these small flocks, also. However, economics have now prevailed, and on most modern chicken farms the birds live in small, windowless, temperature-controlled coops. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with QuarkXPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font.
The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and implemented in gtroff by Lenny Muellner. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 7.0 and Adobe Photoshop 4.0 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary, with assistance from Kevin O'Leary.
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This book was a life-saver when I suddenly acquired news-admin responsibilities for a very large system. It is comprehensive, well-written, and not tied to any flavor of UNIX. On beyond the excellent technical discussions of nntp, C news, and INN, its guide to dealing with the Usenet community is very helpful. A fine addition to the tradition of helpful books from O'Reilly.
