27 Nov
2023
27 Nov
'23
12:26 p.m.
Hi,
During my postgraduate days, I ran ANU NEWS on our VAX/VMS systems and we peered large
parts of the hierarchy. I think even back then we were exclusively NNTP over TCP/IP. I
have a vague memory that I wrote a multi-threaded NNTP server for ANU but it was using the
CMUTEK TCP/IP product so it was all done with QIO and ASTs - none of this weird select
stuff of Unix sockets.
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam messages a day - astrology, voodoo, death
spells, etc. - I'm tempted to get ANU NEWS installed and running again, probably
SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as above, peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth
aren't an issue and I'd like to see NNTP running over DECnet.... And I'm more
familiar with ANU NEWS's SMG interface than I ever was with the likes of tin and rm.
Actually, wanting to do this has less to do with Google's mess and more about
nostalgia. If/when it's all up and running, I'll consider getting it running on
some real Alpha or IA64 hardware, probably based mostly on which has the lower power
consumption.
Just wondering if anybody else is doing/done something similar.
Keith
27 Nov
27 Nov
6:19 p.m.
I’ve not considered trying to do anything like this, however, I’d recommend trying to run
it on OpenVMS/x86, rather than Alpha or Itanium. The power requirements should be lower,
plus RAM and disk are cheap. It would also be good to see things running on the new
version of OpenVMS.
Zane
On Nov 27, 2023, at 3:26 AM, Keith Halewood
<Keith.Halewood(a)pitbulluk.org> wrote:
Hi,
During my postgraduate days, I ran ANU NEWS on our VAX/VMS systems and we peered large
parts of the hierarchy. I think even back then we were exclusively NNTP over TCP/IP. I
have a vague memory that I wrote a multi-threaded NNTP server for ANU but it was using the
CMUTEK TCP/IP product so it was all done with QIO and ASTs – none of this weird select
stuff of Unix sockets.
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam messages a day – astrology, voodoo, death
spells, etc. – I’m tempted to get ANU NEWS installed and running again, probably
SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as above, peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth
aren’t an issue and I’d like to see NNTP running over DECnet…. And I’m more familiar with
ANU NEWS’s SMG interface than I ever was with the likes of tin and rm.
Actually, wanting to do this has less to do with Google’s mess and more about nostalgia.
If/when it’s all up and running, I’ll consider getting it running on some real Alpha or
IA64 hardware, probably based mostly on which has the lower power consumption.
Just wondering if anybody else is doing/done something similar.
Keith
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9:42 p.m.
I’ve actually wanted to do exactly the same but haven’t yet had the time to dedicate to
this.
I actually found trying to get the final distribution a bit of a challenge so I reached
out to Geoff Huston for assistance. He obviously hasn’t worked in this for a very long
time (side note - Geoff is a very busy person and really doesn’t have time for this) but
he provided me with release 620. A bit of further searching and I found I think it was
release 623.
I have this all archived somewhere for later use. I was planning on running it under
VAX.
Let me know if you’d like me to share the latest release files.
I’m hoping to get back into this around March 2024 but it’s a low priority at this
stage.
ANUNEWS was my sole interface for Usenet during my university years and I really enjoyed
using it.
Cheers, Wiz!!
Sent from my iPhone
On 28 Nov 2023, at 4:20 am, Zane Healy <healyzh(a)avanthar.com> wrote:
I’ve not considered trying to do anything like this, however, I’d recommend trying to
run it on OpenVMS/x86, rather than Alpha or Itanium. The power requirements should be
lower, plus RAM and disk are cheap. It would also be good to see things running on the
new version of OpenVMS.
Zane
On Nov 27, 2023, at 3:26 AM, Keith Halewood <Keith.Halewood(a)pitbulluk.org> wrote:
Hi,
During my postgraduate days, I ran ANU NEWS on our VAX/VMS systems and we peered large
parts of the hierarchy. I think even back then we were exclusively NNTP over TCP/IP. I
have a vague memory that I wrote a multi-threaded NNTP server for ANU but it was using the
CMUTEK TCP/IP product so it was all done with QIO and ASTs – none of this weird select
stuff of Unix sockets.
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam messages a day – astrology, voodoo, death
spells, etc. – I’m tempted to get ANU NEWS installed and running again, probably
SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as above, peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth
aren’t an issue and I’d like to see NNTP running over DECnet…. And I’m more familiar with
ANU NEWS’s SMG interface than I ever was with the likes of tin and rm.
Actually, wanting to do this has less to do with Google’s mess and more about nostalgia.
If/when it’s all up and running, I’ll consider getting it running on some real Alpha or
IA64 hardware, probably based mostly on which has the lower power consumption.
Just wondering if anybody else is doing/done something similar.
Keith
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10:39 p.m.
Back in the days before 2000 I used to manage the ANU NEWS system for the
university where I worked.
I too preferred the ANU NEWS user interface and continue to use it on my
hobbyist Alpha and VAX systems to access USENET via its NNTP client reader
mode.
The version I use is V6.2.1 (I can't remember if I added further patches to
the V6.2.0 release to get this). I'd be interested in seeing the 623
release to see what further changes there are.
Also, now that I have an OpenVMS x86 instance up and running too - I might
try a build on it to see what happens...
Tony
On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 7:42 AM David Moylan <djm(a)wiz.net.au> wrote:
I’ve actually wanted to do exactly the same but
haven’t yet had the time
to dedicate to this.
I actually found trying to get the final distribution a bit of a challenge
so I reached out to Geoff Huston for assistance. He obviously hasn’t worked
in this for a very long time (side note - Geoff is a very busy person and
really doesn’t have time for this) but he provided me with release 620. A
bit of further searching and I found I think it was release 623.
I have this all archived somewhere for later use. I was planning on
running it under VAX.
Let me know if you’d like me to share the latest release files.
I’m hoping to get back into this around March 2024 but it’s a low priority
at this stage.
ANUNEWS was my sole interface for Usenet during my university years and I
really enjoyed using it.
Cheers, Wiz!!
[snip]
30 Nov
30 Nov
7:19 p.m.
On 11/27/23 06:26, Keith Halewood wrote:
During my postgraduate days, I ran ANU NEWS on our
VAX/VMS systems and
we peered large parts of the hierarchy. I think even back then we were
exclusively NNTP over TCP/IP. I have a vague memory that I wrote a
multi-threaded NNTP server for ANU but it was using the CMUTEK TCP/IP
product so it was all done with QIO and ASTs – none of this weird select
stuff of Unix sockets.
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam messages a day –
astrology, voodoo, death spells, etc. – I’m tempted to get ANU NEWS
installed and running again, probably SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as
above, peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth aren’t an issue
and I’d like to see NNTP running over DECnet…. And I’m more familiar
with ANU NEWS’s SMG interface than I ever was with the likes of tin and rm.
Actually, wanting to do this has less to do with Google’s mess and more
about nostalgia. If/when it’s all up and running, I’ll consider getting
it running on some real Alpha or IA64 hardware, probably based mostly on
which has the lower power consumption.
Just wondering if anybody else is doing/done something similar.
We have a news feed here, a full feed except the binaries groups. If
we can assist in any way, just let me know. I can give you a feed, etc.
I wonder if it'd be possible to have some functionality implemented
in PyDECnet, possibly by which a news feed can be pointed to it, and it
would translate to/from DECnet? Or something like that.
Yes, fscking Google has really screwed up Usenet, especially just
here lately. As recently as two months ago, comp.os.vms, for example,
was useful and full of great conversations. Now it's flooded with spam,
thousands upon thousands of posts, all from Google "Groups".
I need to look into spam filtering for our incoming feed. If anyone
has any experience with that, please let me know. We're running current
INN under Solaris. (SmartOS) I don't know if it's possible to pipe NNTP
through SpamAssassin or similar.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
13 Dec
13 Dec
5:50 p.m.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the offer of a feed at some point. I'm nowhere near ready here though. The
spam is distressing - I had an automated arrangement for marking it all as spam (and then
hate speech in the case of 'voodoo spells to kill your enemies') using the google
groups UI. Early on, the threads so marked were deleted. Now it looks like items so marked
are actually reinstated by Google shortly afterwards!!
The whole thing reminded me of additional anecdotes during my postgraduate days. By some
accident of actually being interested in usenet, the computer science department where I
researched/worked, negotiated a feed from ukc long before the computer services department
(the central university computing facility) knew usenet was a thing. So we as computer
science fed the rest of the university via the service department and acted as a gateway
for outbound usenet traffic. In an attempt to do something sensible with retention times
and whether or not to retain groups at all, we logged some readership/authorship
statistics.
There were some surprises coming out of the statistics: a group called soc.culture.lebanon
seemed very active and those reading and posting to that group from the university were
accounts whose user-IDs didn't correspond to the names they were using. We eventually
discovered that there was some sort of roaring trade in computer services accounts for
researchers and postgraduates that were being passed on when a researcher left and used
for the rather long period of time before they were disabled and deleted. Prior to
discovering this however, some of us looked into soc.culture.lebanon to discover a hotbed
of flame-wars, personal attacks and such, a large number of which seemed to be caused or
fanned by one of these 'surplus' accounts.
I'm not sure whether I'm ashamed or what to say that I facilitated the injection
of a fake message, constructed in the style of the central protagonist, into the
department's spooling area... and out it went. The responses provoked across the
planet were varied to say the least - my tears of laughter at some point were quite
genuine. Meanwhile, the computer services department investigated their somewhat lax
account cleanup procedures and those making use of the facility. We all then moved on to
what we were supposed to be doing.
This was all back in the late 80s by the way.
Keith
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave McGuire [mailto:mcguire@neurotica.com]
Sent: 30 November 2023 18:20
To: The Hobbyist DECnet mailing list <hecnet(a)lists.dfupdate.se>
Subject: [HECnet] Re: Usenet
On 11/27/23 06:26, Keith Halewood wrote:
During my postgraduate days, I ran ANU NEWS on our
VAX/VMS systems and
we peered large parts of the hierarchy. I think even back then we were
exclusively NNTP over TCP/IP. I have a vague memory that I wrote a
multi-threaded NNTP server for ANU but it was using the CMUTEK TCP/IP
product so it was all done with QIO and ASTs – none of this weird
select stuff of Unix sockets.
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam messages a day –
astrology, voodoo, death spells, etc. – I’m tempted to get ANU NEWS
installed and running again, probably SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as
above, peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth aren’t an
issue and I’d like to see NNTP running over DECnet…. And I’m more
familiar with ANU NEWS’s SMG interface than I ever was with the likes of tin and rm.
Actually, wanting to do this has less to do with Google’s mess and
more about nostalgia. If/when it’s all up and running, I’ll consider
getting it running on some real Alpha or IA64 hardware, probably based
mostly on which has the lower power consumption.
Just wondering if anybody else is doing/done something similar.
We have a news feed here, a full feed except the binaries groups. If we can assist in
any way, just let me know. I can give you a feed, etc.
I wonder if it'd be possible to have some functionality implemented in PyDECnet,
possibly by which a news feed can be pointed to it, and it would translate to/from DECnet?
Or something like that.
Yes, fscking Google has really screwed up Usenet, especially just here lately. As
recently as two months ago, comp.os.vms, for example, was useful and full of great
conversations. Now it's flooded with spam, thousands upon thousands of posts, all
from Google "Groups".
I need to look into spam filtering for our incoming feed. If anyone has any experience
with that, please let me know. We're running current INN under Solaris. (SmartOS) I
don't know if it's possible to pipe NNTP through SpamAssassin or similar.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
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15 Dec
15 Dec
3:17 p.m.
On 12/13/23 11:50, Keith Halewood wrote:
Thanks for the offer of a feed at some point. I'm
nowhere near ready here though. The spam is distressing - I had an automated arrangement
for marking it all as spam (and then hate speech in the case of 'voodoo spells to kill
your enemies') using the google groups UI. Early on, the threads so marked were
deleted. Now it looks like items so marked are actually reinstated by Google shortly
afterwards!!
People are going to have to start dumping Google at some point,
whether they realize it yet or not. :-(
The whole thing reminded me of additional anecdotes
during my postgraduate days. By some accident of actually being interested in usenet, the
computer science department where I researched/worked, negotiated a feed from ukc long
before the computer services department (the central university computing facility) knew
usenet was a thing. So we as computer science fed the rest of the university via the
service department and acted as a gateway for outbound usenet traffic. In an attempt to
do something sensible with retention times and whether or not to retain groups at all, we
logged some readership/authorship statistics.
There were some surprises coming out of the statistics: a group called
soc.culture.lebanon seemed very active and those reading and posting to that group from
the university were accounts whose user-IDs didn't correspond to the names they were
using. We eventually discovered that there was some sort of roaring trade in computer
services accounts for researchers and postgraduates that were being passed on when a
researcher left and used for the rather long period of time before they were disabled and
deleted. Prior to discovering this however, some of us looked into soc.culture.lebanon to
discover a hotbed of flame-wars, personal attacks and such, a large number of which seemed
to be caused or fanned by one of these 'surplus' accounts.
I'm not sure whether I'm ashamed or what to say that I facilitated the injection
of a fake message, constructed in the style of the central protagonist, into the
department's spooling area... and out it went. The responses provoked across the
planet were varied to say the least - my tears of laughter at some point were quite
genuine. Meanwhile, the computer services department investigated their somewhat lax
account cleanup procedures and those making use of the facility. We all then moved on to
what we were supposed to be doing.
This was all back in the late 80s by the way.
Ok that's great, when I was wrangling news starting around 1993
soc.culture.lebanon was legendary, but I never saw much traffic there
and always wondered why. Now I know why!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
30 Nov
30 Nov
7:31 p.m.
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam messages
a day -
astrology, voodoo, death spells, etc. - I'm tempted to get ANU NEWS
installed and running again, probably SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as
above, peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth aren't an
issue and I'd like to see NNTP running over DECnet.... And I'm more
familiar with ANU NEWS's SMG interface than I ever was with the likes
of tin and rm.
Understand that all of that flood of crap (nearly 15,000 spam posts a
day to c.o.v.) is coming through to other news providers, so your own
server won't save you without adding filtering.
Sadly, Tin doesn't have a way to filter on injector. Sigh.
De
13 Dec
13 Dec
5:18 p.m.
That's the plan. I have a fairly good home-brew neural-net based filter for email spam
and network 'threats' that's in control of the firewall and a front-end smtp
server with diversion and analysis. I was going to apply it to an incoming newsfeed and
get it learning even more.
Keith
-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Boone [mailto:drb@msu.edu]
Sent: 30 November 2023 18:32
To: The Hobbyist DECnet mailing list <hecnet(a)lists.dfupdate.se>
Subject: [HECnet] Re: Usenet
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam messages
a day - > astrology, voodoo, death spells, etc. - I'm tempted to get ANU NEWS
> installed and running again, probably SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as > above,
peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth aren't an > issue and I'd
like to see NNTP running over DECnet.... And I'm more > familiar with ANU
NEWS's SMG interface than I ever was with the likes > of tin and rm.
Understand that all of that flood of crap (nearly 15,000 spam posts a day to c.o.v.) is
coming through to other news providers, so your own server won't save you without
adding filtering.
Sadly, Tin doesn't have a way to filter on injector. Sigh.
De
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5:28 p.m.
Google Groups is getting de-peered by NNTP servers left and right. I
just blocked them earlier this week. If you're running inn with
cleanfeed, just block them altogether. Some legitimate articles will
certainly get whacked, but people are ditching Google Groups for Usenet
access in droves so that's a shrinking problem.
-Dave
On 12/13/23 11:18, Keith Halewood wrote:
That's the plan. I have a fairly good home-brew
neural-net based filter for email spam and network 'threats' that's in
control of the firewall and a front-end smtp server with diversion and analysis. I was
going to apply it to an incoming newsfeed and get it learning even more.
Keith
-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Boone [mailto:drb@msu.edu]
Sent: 30 November 2023 18:32
To: The Hobbyist DECnet mailing list <hecnet(a)lists.dfupdate.se>
Subject: [HECnet] Re: Usenet
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
With Google groups being hit by 1000s of spam
messages a day - > astrology, voodoo, death spells, etc. - I'm tempted to get ANU
NEWS > installed and running again, probably SIMH-hosted VAX OpenVMS and, as >
above, peer some of the groups. Disc space and bandwidth aren't an > issue and
I'd like to see NNTP running over DECnet.... And I'm more > familiar with ANU
NEWS's SMG interface than I ever was with the likes > of tin and rm.
Understand that all of that flood of crap (nearly 15,000 spam posts a day to c.o.v.) is
coming through to other news providers, so your own server won't save you without
adding filtering.
Sadly, Tin doesn't have a way to filter on injector. Sigh.
De
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373
days inactive
391
days old
9 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
Dave McGuire -
David Moylan -
Dennis Boone -
Keith Halewood -
Tony Nicholson -
Zane Healy