Last updated:June 16, 2000

news.datasync.com is equipped with a 500 mHz Pentium III CPU, 768 MB RAM, three BusLogic Ultra Wide SCSI adapters, and 10 SCSI drives totaling over 200 Gigabytes of storage. Article retention is typically 21 days for non-alt groups, 14 days for non-binary alt groups, and 2-5 days for binary groups.

newsfeed.datasync.com is a 500 mHz Pentium III machine with 256 MB RAM, a striped 12 Gig spool and is running the Diablo news transit software. It receives a Cidera Skycache satellite newsfeed and exchanges full feeds with eight peers at this time. This server is currently ranked in the Freenix Top 1000 Usenet Sites list. It is currently offering 700-800K articles per day to news.datasync.com.

Note: Readers must set their software's news server to news.datasync.com. newsfeed.datasync.com is for transit only and will not converse with readers.

Groups, cancels, and filtering policy

Current group count on news.datasync.com is just over 10,500. We carry all of the Big Eight hierarchies and alt but not many regional and local hierarchies that cater to areas beyond our primary service area. Some servers brag about how they carry 35,000 or more groups. This is a bad idea for many reasons. One, you don't want to spend all day refreshing the group list over your dialup connection. Two, dead or bogus groups are good for one thing: accumulating junk. Three, it's silly to waste spool space on groups that no one here reads anyway. We will add any hierarchy by request to usenet@datasync.com

Spam, as in abuse of Usenet resources not a brand of canned meat, is a major and growing problem on Usenet today. It is estimated that two-thirds or more of Usenet traffic is either massively posted spam -- most often sex web site ads whose purpose is to drown out legitimate traffic in adult-oriented groups -- or cancel messages to remove said spam.

Our approach is to detect and filter spam ourselves instead of relying on cancels. We use both Diablo's EMP filter on newsfeed.datasync.com and Jeremy Nixon's Clean Feed to further cleanse the incoming feed to news.datasync.com. This doesn't result in a completely spam-free environment but it does bring the signal-to-noise ratio way up AND allows us to keep article retention times high without having a huge disk array.

We do not process cancel messages except those generated by our readers. Cancel processing is hugely inefficient compared to filtering. Cancels are also a growing form of abuse: too many kooks have figured out how to cancel legitimate posts en masse. And, while the spam cancellers do a wonderful job, we'd rather not have to rely on others to keep our servers from being overrun with spam. Cancels are propagated by the transit server to our outside peers, but not to news.datasync.com.

New to Usenet? Deja News at http://www.dejanews.com can help you find the newsgroups you're interested in. And check out this site an index of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) for various newsgroups: http://www.faqs.org/usenet/

Note: Datasync does not allow NNTP access to anyone outside our domain other than our feeds and customers. No exceptions.

Local and regional newsgroups

Have you checked out the local and statewide newsgroups yet?

datasync.general
datasync.test
ms.coast.general
ms.config
ms.general
ms.hattiesburg.general
ms.linux
ms.test
alabama.announce
alabama.config
alabama.education
alabama.general
alabama.jobs
alabama.mobile.general
alabama.politics
alabama.sports.alabama
alabama.sports.auburn
alabama.sports.misc
alabama.test