Re: What is going on with my Dialup?

On Mon, 04 Aug 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.networking, in
article <4yOlk.20514$N87.8769@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, clay wrote:

Ditto... I find myself saving a lot of what you post to refer back to
down the road.

Flattery will get you nowhere ;-)

Is this group new? Only see posts from a month back.

Not by a _long_ shot. The headers of the article I'm replying to shows

Xref: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.os.linux.networking:484936

while a post in a.o.l.u I replied to yesterday had

Xref: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com alt.os.linux.ubuntu:78914

The number on the end is sequential - incremented for each article that
a news server has in a specific newsgroup. Thus, the giganews server
has seen about 79,000 articles in a.o.l.ubuntu since the group was
created in November 2005. This group (c.o.l.n) has seen around 485,000
articles since it was created in December 1994. This is one of 17
Linux newsgroups in the official "Big Eight" hierarchy:

[compton ~]$ zgrep linux big.8.list.07.15.08.gz | cut -f1 | column
comp.os.linux.advocacy comp.os.linux.misc
comp.os.linux.alpha comp.os.linux.networking
comp.os.linux.announce comp.os.linux.portable
comp.os.linux.answers comp.os.linux.powerpc
comp.os.linux.development.apps comp.os.linux.security
comp.os.linux.development.system comp.os.linux.setup
comp.os.linux.embedded comp.os.linux.x
comp.os.linux.hardware comp.os.linux.xbox
comp.os.linux.m68k
[compton ~]$

and these groups should be carried by every news server. There are
_also_ a large bunch of other groups in the 'alt.*' hierarchy and may
be a huge number that merely include the string 'linux' in the name:

[compton ~]$ grep -c ^alt.*linux .newsrc
95
[compton ~]$ grep -c linux .newsrc
1159
[compton ~]$

The problem with these groups is that they are unofficial, and are
carried at the whim of the individual news server administrator. The
recent fiasco with the New York Attorney General "negotiating" with
several ISPs to remove ~80 child-pr0n groups from the 'alt.binar*'
groups illustrates this, as several dropped all 'alt.*' groups, while
at least one eliminated Usenet entirely.

As for how many posts you see, that is a function of the storage space
available on the news server, and how many articles your news reader
is configured to read. A quick check at giganews shows 65687 articles
_claimed_ to be available in comp.os.linux.networking, which would be
about 5 years worth of posts (if my logs are to be believed). I haven't
checked this claim. A month back in this group is about 510 articles
which seems to be a low number for a commercial news server.

Old guy
.

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