Planned Outages, Service Status, etc.

[Murray-Mint]

Firstly, the planned outage email the other day was excellent! It was sufficiently full of PROPER information - it made me feel informed of what's happening.

Are there plans for a service status page, and also an FAQ page or similar with details of SMTP servers, DNS Servers, NTP servers, etc.

Also, any plans of an NNTP server?

[Wizzo]

All of this is planned. A complete service status and notification system, not just for ADSL but for all of our services. THe DSL service will have it's own website with all the essential details and guides.

NNTP isn't planned at present, but we're always open to suggestions as you know... so keep em coming :)

[Inferno]

NNTP?

and yea email was good, GGWP

[CyberDrac]

Suggestion ...

IRC bouncer service ... quid a month or sommat?

CD

[Murray-Mint]

Originally posted by inferno
NNTP?

Network News Transfer Protocol

Newsgroups. Not concerned with the binary groups TBH, just the text groups.

[Nivek]

would it be possible to get the option for these alerts sent to multiple addresses. - service specific so for example any thing related to adsl gets sent to me and person x, other service's get sent to my email?

[Pumpkin]

NNTP won't be happening. The binaries are prohibitively expensive to run and the content is 99.9% illegal.

For text groups, we recommend Google Groups (http://groups.google.co.uk/groups/dir?lnk=od&sel=33554433).

If anyone is interested in a technical discussion of why we aren't running newsgroups, then feel free to contact me on IRC.

[RocketKnight]

Originally posted by Pumpkin
If anyone is interested in a technical discussion of why we aren't running newsgroups, then feel free to contact me on IRC.
I imagine it will sound something like this:

Curious Person: Why won't MPUK run newsgroups?
Pumpkin: Because WAREZ MADE THE BABY JESUS CRY!!!

:p:

[TimmyNoShoes]

I think baby jesus would be quite delighted with free pr0n and mp3's

[Murray-Mint]

Oh, I can completely understand why no Binary groups :) I'll stick to news.individual.net for my text groups then :)

[Boffykins]

I subscribe to PlusNET's Service Status Email. They had continual outages and problems with "news spool server 4" for months. now the fact they have 4 servers at least, and that it's called a spool server leads me to believe there's other types of server that go to make up an NNTP Service. I would say it's a bit overkill for something you can get on Google Groups for free, or if you really must have your Usenet Warez, then there's plenty of sites you can pay.

[bvark]

Last time we looked at taking a binaries news service, I think we would have needed about 220Mbps at peak for the NNTP feeds, and well over 2TB of disk for any kind of sensible retention policy.

Interestingly, GigaNews (the market leader in outsourced UseNet) accounts for over 5% of the traffic on my network.