🚀 go-pugleaf

Wie waers mit einer "offiziellen" Stellungnahme zu folgendem posting?
Wuerd viele brennend interessieren!

Mich zumindest.

Peter Lipp, TU Graz

In tu-graz.diverses, bri@blah.math.tu-graz.ac.at (Brian Ward) wrote:

>heidrun@mech.tu-graz.ac.at (Heidrun Kirchweger) writes:
>|Es schaut so aus, als ob in den internationalen Newsgroups keine Artikel
>|aus .de und .at neu hereinkommen. Oft erscheinen auch Antworten, von denen
>|die Fragen nie zu uns gekommen sind.
>|[..]
>
>Wie schaut dies aus? Ich hab's gerade geschrieben, und ich glaube, dass es
>das Problem erklaert. Sorry fuer's Englisch.
>
>--
>The problem with USENET around here, B. Ward, <bri@blah.math.tu-graz.ac.at>
>24 Nov 95
>
>I've been watching the USENET situation here at TU Graz with amazement at
>the ridiculous manner they've set up their news server. This seems to
>reflect a deeper problem with news in the whole of Austria, but I can't be
>sure because I don't have access to the other news servers.
>
>The symptom we see most directly is that articles take a long time to get
>here. During good times, they're only two days late. At the time I'm
>writing this, things are 5 days to a week late (even for articles posted
>at, say, uni-linz.ac.at). That's just plain ridiculous. There's a reason
>for this.
>
>Put simply, the reason is that no one actually talks to one another.
>
>All incoming aconet news appears to come in through a central server called
>newsfeed.aco.net. This in itself is a stupid idea. In theory, this server
>has to feed 10 or so other servers, which, with a full feed like that
>(alt.binaries.* included!), is certainly enough to make it melt. It only
>seems to have two external feeds that actually give it anything, anyway (but
>that's actually almost okay).
>
>Then let's look at news.tu-graz.ac.at. It has two newsfeeds (as far as I
>can tell) - the aforementioned molten server and news.kfunigraz.ac.at.
>Likewise for news.kfunigraz.ac.at. That's not enough, especially when you
>consider where the new news is coming from in the first place and the
>network that's in between.
>
>And then it all snowballs when there's some other problem. The new news
>server here was acting flaky when it first arrived and went down quite
>often. That made things worse. As I'm writing this, they're playing some
>weird games with the network in Vienna and the connections to there are
>quite slow, and that's made things really late as well.
>
>So, basically, there's really no backup, really no peering, etc. But wait,
>there's more! They've taken the usual old approach that they always seem to
>do when there's a problem like this - throw six tons of CPU at it and hope
>it goes away. news.tu-graz is a DEC Alpha, news.kfunigraz is some HP
>monster, and newsfeed.aco.net is an RS/6000. As anyone experienced with
>USENET administration knows, this doesn't work, and if I were you, I'd be
>laughing my head off by now. I'm afraid I can't laugh with you because your
>laughter would reach me five days after you posted it and it wouldn't be
>funny anymore.
>
>(It gets even better, too. There's a newsgroup, at.network.aconet, that
>tells of scheduled outages and things. But of course, after the five days
>that it takes for those articles to get here from Vienna, the outage has
>come and gone..)
>
>So, now that I've explained how a bad news system is set up, let me tell
>you about a good one that's perfectly feasible here. I have some personal
>experience with this - it's at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU),
>where I graduated from many moons ago.
>
>PSU has four news servers on campus (there are actually five, but I don't
>count psuvm (the big iron) because it's a mutant and is just as well
>ignored). Three of the four are "well-fed," meaning that they have external
>feeds. These all feed each other - mostly with nntplink because that's
>more or less instant propagation - which really lessens the load on not
>only the internet feed itself, but the servers as well, because once one
>server has an article, then they've all got it and no longer needs to be
>transmitted. This is the key point, and the thing they don't do here. The
>result is that in the worst case, you'll probably see an article about six
>hours after it was posted. Most of the news goes through one server,
>because it has the fastest feed, but there is backup when you need it and
>that's something aconet doesn't have.
>
>(These aren't fast machines, either. The one machine that most of the news
>for PSU passes through is a Sun SPARCStation ELC, for example.)
>
>[thanks to Dave Barr for providing me with some specifics about this]
>
>So, how does this relate to Austria? How could one fix it up?
>
>It's simple. First of all, the best connections are in Vienna and that's
>where all external news should come in. However, instead of just one news
>server getting external feeds, there should be three or so. Furthermore,
>these six servers:
>
>newsfeed.aco.net (well, it's there, might as well keep it around)
>news.tuwien.ac.at
>news.univie.ac.at
>news.wu-wien.ac.at
>news.boku.ac.at
>news.oeaw.ac.at
>
>should all feed each other with (preferably) nntplink links. Maybe they do
>already; as I said, I don't really know. I have, however, looked at
>news.tuwien and it seems that it only gets news from newsfeed.aco.net.
>They really don't have much of delay times at all, and one would guess that
>the only reason for this is that newsfeed.aco.net is very, very close
>network-wise to them.
>
>The things I'm worried about, and why I'm writing this, are the servers in
>the provinces. The connections aren't so bad from Vienna outwards (normally,
>that is; as I write this, they're doing nasty things in Vienna making them
>abnormally slow). There's plenty of bandwidth there; the response times
>just aren't as quick. With news, response times are important. Furthermore,
>the connections between the provinces (say, between Graz and Linz),
>although they go through Vienna, are also pretty spiffy.
>
>The solution is thus obvious.
>
>Each of the servers like:
>
>news.tu-graz.ac.at
>news.kfunigraz.ac.at
>news.uni-linz.ac.at
>news.sbg.ac.at
>news.uibk.ac.at
>news.uni-klu.ac.at
>
>should talk to (that is, feed), say, three of the servers in Vienna (trying
>real hard to avoid newsfeed.aco.net), and _also_ each other. This would
>ultilize the network available, provide a reasonable backup, offload the
>servers, and stay that way for a while to come.
>
>It really is that simple..
>

Peter Lipp, Dept. Of Applied Information Processing
University of Technology Graz, Austria
plipp@iaik.tu-graz.ac.at   --- +43 316 873 5513
http://www.iaik.tu-graz.ac.at