NetNews Working Group

Report of the RIPE29 Netnews WG meeting

Report of the RIPE29 Netnews WG meeting

37 attendees
chair:  Felix Kugler
scribe: Leigh Porter

1. Review of outstanding actions:

A26.N3 Upgrade servers to Newsbone standards
A27.N2 Newsbone deployment

There has been some progress with both actions. However, the WG
suggest to drop them from the list as they are ongoing items per
definitionem. 

A27.N1 Tool Support for non-INN servers

There have been improvements, though not by WG members. This action
will be carried forward.

2.  A review of the Netnews-WG

As this WG goes into its 3rd year soon, a short review about the
activities was given. 

The WG now focuses aroung three working areas:

- feed topology issues
- server tuning issues
- reliability & QOS

The WG's conception is that it is in no position to really coordinate
News feeds in Europe. Rather it tries to help coordination efforts by
providing information about traffic streams, tools to visualize and
monitor traffic, and a discussion forum. The charter has to be updated
to reflect this change. 

A29.N1 Felix Kugler to update charter on WG WWW server

The Newsbone document shall be stripped from unnecessary requirements
which might have prevented some ISPs from joining.

A29.N2 Felix Kugler to update Newsbone document and related WWW pages

3.  Presentations and proposals for new projects 

- Group list maintenance (Gerhard Winkler):
  Use synchronisation with refernce servers where conventional group
  maintenance using control messages is not sufficient.  

A29.N3 WG to provide information about maintainers and reference servers
A29.N4 Gerhard Winkler to collect data and edit info page

- Article loss measurements (Gerhard Winkler)
  Proposal to measure article loss with test articles. Will not be
  pursued, use endusers as indicators instead ! 

- News admins guide - Building and running a news service (Leigh Porter)
  Do's and don'ts for qunning backbone News servers.

A29.N5 Leigh Porter to write a "News admins guide"

- Spam on Usenet (Felix Kugler)
  Short introduction to Spam in Usenet, differences to email spamming,
  countermeasures...