JANET Usenet News Feed Service Rationalisation

Over recent years it seems that the use of the JANET Usenet News service has declined.  A survey was carried out last year amongst client organisations which resulted in many organisations switching from the feed to the reader service.  The decision was therefore taken to rationalise the service, reducing the number of core feed servers from 4 to 2

Client organisations will be encouraged to switch wherever possible from the feed to the reader service.  All organisations wishing to continue to use the feed service will need to justify their choice.  We have emailed all organisations using the feed service, asking them to let us know their intention.

Analysis of usage indicates that many News Feed client organisations have requested feeds which their own server hardware cannot cope with, thus creating huge backlogs at the core servers.  As part of the rationalisation programme the JANET News Feed Operations team will be contacting individual client organisations, where necessary, to discuss issues and potential resolutions.

At present, the core service provides a full “alt.binaries” feed.  While some is filtered for policy reasons, a large proportion of the remainder is inappropriate for an academic service.  Only a very small number of client organisations use these groups yet they account for over 90% of the total volume of news articles on the central service.  As part of the rationalisation therefore, this facility will only be provided to organisations that specifically request it and a backup feed will no longer be available.