Model Forum / General / Models / December 2005

I have been watching the problems people are having with their ISPs
dropping usenet access. People have suggested a few options which
generally cost money. I might have a better option if people think its
a goer.

For the last 5 years I have been running a public access news server
at news.totallyobjects.com. This is a news server specifically
targetted at computer programmers that use the Smalltalk programming
language. We have never expired a single message and have included a
few local news groups for special purposes.

We have been made an offer by Giganews to take on this server and run
it for free on our behalf. We are close to an agreement on this.

If it comes off, we will have a fully configured and paid for news
server which will become redundant.

As a second string to my bow, I now also run a model shop in Ipswich
UK - SBX Model Shop. We specialise in Aircraft and Military. What I
would like to do is to re-configure the existing news server to be
news.sbxmodelshop.co.uk and to set it up to give full free access to
the following

rec.models.scale
alt.binaries.pictures.aviation
alt.binaries.models.scale

We would also like to include alt.binaries.multimedia.aviation but the
size of the posting there may breach our daily volume allowances.

For the technical amongst you, we are using DNews as the server and
have two feeds: 1 is an iHave feed from newshosting.com; 2 is a
'sucking' feed from Airnews.net. This ensures that we get every
message. iHave is a push feed into us whilst the 'sucking' feed works
as if we were a news reader.

For the non-technical amongst you this would mean the following:

You can point your existing news reader at news.sbxmodelshop.co.uk and
you will find a news server with the above news groups freely
available without login, password or payment. there will also be no
involvement of our model shop in this so you won't see ads or anything
else that smacks of commercialism - only the address will have the
shop name in it but...

We will also have the capability of creating local news groups for
special interests so we could create locally for instance
rec.models.scale.pacificwar or anything else such as this. these would
only exist in our server but could provide a good service.

What do you think?

If it is a goer then it could be up and running early in the new year.
If our deal with Giganews fails for any reason then we might have to
rethink but we wanted to check reactions.

David
http://www.sbxmodelshop.co.uk