Monitoring Usenet News
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Bill Davidsen
Running Usenet news on a large server has never been easy because the nature of Usenet has
been to expand to fill all resources. In the days of dial-up modems when I started running
news, the Telebit Trailblazer modem came out with 18-Kb connections. We thought the bandwidth
problems were over, because we could handle several MB a day — now we handle several MB
a second. To help run news on the least hardware available, I have generated some tools to
help me see what the systems are doing.
There are three major Usenet players in the UNIX world: INN, the oldest and probably most
widely used; Diablo, which evolved from a simple multi-threaded transit server to a scalable
software for readers and transit; and Cyclone, the only commercial product noted here,
originally from Highwinds Software. Each of these includes some reporting tools that can g
enerate daily reports, graphs, and other high-level summaries of what the system is doing.
However, it's sometimes nice to have a report on system activity that falls between a
daily summary and the second-to-second detail of the raw log files. Additionally, these tools w
ork well to generate single page snapshots that fit on a slide allowing you to keep management informed.
INN Report Generation Tools
One thing to watch is how much news you get over the course of a day.
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