Forums / Support / Planned News Server Upgrades

Planned News Server Upgrades

by BinaryBoy @
The admin sent some info today related to the four main servers (news, news2, binaries, venus):

"...we are now in the process of implementing a new program called SurgeNews across our corporate server fleet. We have already begun implementing this new program on the servers that our direct subscribers use and so far it seems to be working very well."

"SurgeNews is a Usenet proxy system that lets us run several spool servers hidden behind a cluster of front end proxy servers. Once fully implemented it will appears as if your customers only have access to a single server but they will actually have the access to all of the data available on the four backend servers that you are currently connecting to. The only difference will be when your customers download headers from a group the headers from all four backend servers will appear in their news reader as if it were a single super server. This new architecture will enable us to scale out our service in a way that has not been possible in the past due to hardware limitations."

Full implementation of the SurgeNews system is still a few months away and we still have some bugs to work out. In the mean time please bear with us. We do realize that completion and retention are not as good as they once were. The old system was simply no longer able to deal with enormous growth that Usenet has experienced over the last few years. This is why we are now implementing this new new architecture...."
 

BinaryBoy's reply to BinaryBoy #578 @

Venus is now shut down. The bandwidth limit on news2.binaryboy.com has been doubled to make up the difference. The same newsgroups should still be available.
 

BinaryBoy's reply to BinaryBoy #732 @

news, news2, binaries and venus are all pointing to different servers now. This is in preparation for the SurgeNews system mentioned in this thread. Unfortunately it will still be a few months before this is fully implemented.
 

BinaryBoy's reply to BinaryBoy #734 @

If you suddenly don't see any articles on the server, try resetting the article numbers. In Binary Boy, go to the Master Reset command under the File menu, check Reset "next" pointers and uncheck everything else, then click OK. If you still don't see any articles, delete the cache files. You can delete all cache files from the Master Reset window or delete individual newsgroup cache files from C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Binary Boy\Cache\ When you delete individual files, be sure to also delete the associated line in the .bbcx file.

For example, if you delete news.yourserver.com!!alt.binaries.cd.image, you also need to delete the 2 lines in the .bbcx file that look something like these:

news.yourserver.com!!alt.binaries.cd.image
18632691-18962599