This is the information pack for the JANET Usenet News Service. The information is presented in the form of a "Frequently Asked Questions" list.
Other documentation about these services, including application forms
to start using them, is available at:
http://www.webarchive.ja.net/usenet/
The JANET Usenet News Service:
JANET News Feed Service:
JANET News Reader Service:
The JANET Usenet News Service is an umbrella name for two services aimed at delivering Usenet News to users at JANET sites.
The two component services are as follows:
This service is appropriate for an organisation in which a large number of users read News in many different newsgroups.
Organisations with a low volume of News reading requirements will find this the most effective arrangement.
All organisations with a Primary Connection are eligible to use the JANET Usenet News Service. Organisations with a Secondary Connection who would like access to Usenet News should approach their host site.
All JANET organisations can run a local news server and request a feed from the News Feed Service. This is the best solution for large sites with thousands of users. The cost of buying the hardware and setting up the software is found by the institution.
Small sites are eligible to use the News Reader Service. Usage is monitored and sites which place too much load on the service will be asked to consider an alternative service. JANET(UK) will advise sites about the alternatives available.
The JANET Usenet News Service carries all the newsgroups widely available in the world (except for geographically limited hierarchies, naturally). Since this amounts to over a gigabyte of data per day, many sites who use the News Feed Service prefer to request a feed of only a subset of this. Some sites also limit the selection of newsgroups according to local policy on content.
The main hierarchies which can be chosen are:
The JISC has an AUP for JANET designed to help prevent illegal material from propagating on JANET, including Usenet news articles with illegal content (for example, covered by the obscenity laws). Under this policy, various newsgroups are banned from the JANET Usenet News Service. The list of banned newsgroups is based on past experience of their content and recommendations from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), who identify newsgroups that frequently include articles containing illegal material. The list is updated quarterly. If you require access to the list of newsgroups that are banned from the JANET Usenet News Service, please contact JCS.
Whenever material is identified that is clearly illegal, JANET(UK) will remove it from the backbone JANET News servers. Organisations using the service are asked to help with this practice by reporting illegal material. Please follow the procedure set out in the web page about the reporting of illegal material.
Certain newsgroups are not carried in the service because experience or advice from the IWF indicates that they commonly include illegal material, but beyond that, JANET(UK) gives no undertaking about the content of articles.
You may wish to restrict News reading from parts of your network to a small number of newsgroups whose contents are known to be acceptable to you. Such control will never be completely effective; in particular it is not helpful to go to great lengths to restrict use of the JANET service unless you also consider other ways in which your users might obtain News articles from the Internet.
JANET routinely uses advice from the IWF in identifying illegal material in all other groups and in removing individual articles from its servers. After such removal these articles will not be propagated to JANET sites. Those propagated before notice from IWF are beyond JANET's control.
In addition, as a measure to combat spam articles, the feed sites will not propagate any article cross-posted to more than 8 newsgroups or of over 400KB in size.
Where JANET(UK) asks you to take action in regard to some incident, you are expected to respond promptly.
Since an article with illegal content may be posted to any newsgroup, it is suggested that institutions supplement the JANET policy with their own local policy. However, note that the name of a newsgroup is often a poor indicator of the risk of finding in it any material you do not wish your users to see.
As it is not possible for anyone to vet the hundreds of thousands of news articles which arrive each day, it is thought that the provider of a Usenet News Service cannot be held responsible for specific news articles until they are brought to the provider's attention, for example by a complaint being made. In this case, legal precedent suggests you, as provider of the service at your institution, must act promptly to remove any material that has caused anyone offence. If you wish to be routinely notified of any illegal material identified by the IWF, please contact JCS.
Whenever material is identified that is clearly illegal, JANET(UK) will remove it from the News servers, and organisations using the service are asked to help with this practice by reporting illegal material. Please follow the procedure set out in the web page about the report of illegal material.
You must ensure that what your users do with the service (including posting articles to it) is legal, conforms with the JANET AUP and is appropriate to your relationship with those users.
If you use the JANET News Feed Service and run your own INN news server, you may want to look into using the cleanfeed filter which allows you to drop articles selectively, based on keywords. Whether or not articles contain illegal content, these tools are useful for reducing the amount of spam (inappropriate commercial advertising) that your users are exposed to.
Support is available from the News server managers during the working day. All server managers are committed to providing a specific level of service, which includes responding to your queries as soon as is practically possible after the server manager has received them, and completing the resolution of the issues you raise within 5 working days in 90% of cases. On a few working days each year (agreed holidays) the support is not available. Your News server manager can help to diagnose any problems with the News feed from them to you. They may also be able to help with configuration issues, if experience with the particular software you choose to use is available. For the News Feed Service, as all the feed sites run INN, this is well supported.
Each time you wish to raise a new issue (such as a query about the service, or a request for help) you must go through JCS directly in order to obtain a ticket number. Once you have done this, your message will be passed to the relevant News server manager, who will then liaise with you. You should not contact the News server managers directly.
You undertake to support your end users from your own resources. The JANET Usenet News Service does not directly support end users, and you should ensure that your local support arrangements are adequate.
Typical problems encountered include, but are not limited to:
Use of the service must comply with the JANET AUP. You undertake to accept responsibility for the use which people make of the service within the networks and domains you have specified. In particular, you are expected to offer guidance to your users on proper use of the service, and of Usenet news in general.
If it appears that abuse has occurred, particularly where an article has been posted from your network through the JANET server, you are expected to identify any individuals responsible and take action agreed with JANET(UK). JANET(UK) will in general only know the IP address from which the article was posted and the time, and it will be necessary for you to identify individuals from those details. Where a proxy or firewall is in use you should be quite clear what procedures are necessary. You should only ask JANET to provide the JANET News Reader Service to systems and networks where you can support such tracing.
In general, JANET(UK) will not ask for the identity of an individual but will seek your assurance that appropriate action has been taken. However, where the privacy of other individual users or the integrity of network services in JANET or elsewhere are affected, and in any case where law enforcement agencies are entitled to personal details, JANET(UK) will expect you to co-operate. You should ensure that your Data Protection registrations and other procedures cover these requirements. You may wish to make your users aware that you have agreed to this arrangement.
You can change the selection of newsgroups that is made available to your organisation at any time by making a request to JCS. The newsgroups available on all the News servers are updated each week via an interchange between the JANET News Feed servers. If you discover a hierarchy or a newsgroup that is not carried, it is possible to request that it be added to the hierarchies and newsgroups carried by the JANET News Service. The News server managers will endeavour to find a source for the newsgroups, unless distribution of the groups is restricted geographically or amongst specific co-operating institutions.
None of the JANET News servers can make any newsgroups listed on the banned list available to organisations.
The JANET News Feed Service offers a feed of Usenet News to a news server at any primary JANET site which wants one (one feed per institution). It replaced the old system of news distribution whereby Usenet News had a single point of entry to JANET, was then distributed to a number of other sites, and gradually propagated around JANET via an ad hoc series of feeds.
The service is funded by JANET(UK) on behalf of the JISC. JANET(UK) co-ordinates its contractors to provide this service to all other JANET sites. There is no charge to JANET sites for the service.
The service comprises a backbone of servers located at feed sites configured in a ring. Each feed site receives a News feed from a commercial ISP; some also receive a feed from a major overseas university. This news is then propagated to the other feed sites, and each feed site sends a feed to its set of client sites - other participating JANET sites which have requested a feed from the service. Thus, if you join the service as a client site, you will receive a news feed from a feed site. You need your own news server to accept this feed.
The feed sites provide a backup service for each other, so your site will in fact also receive another feed from a second feed site. This feed is time-delayed by 2 hours so it will only feed you a significant volume of articles if your primary feed site is down for longer than that.
Note that the service is a traditional "push" news feed - you specify which groups you want to receive, and your feed site will offer you these groups using the NNTP protocol. For many technical reasons, the service does not support news "sucking" whereby you "pull" what news you want from the JANET server, when you want it.
You may join the service via JCS or the web. Details on the procedure to join the service are available here.
A suggested minimum configuration for your local news server would be:
Although news servers have traditionally been run on Unix servers from the likes of Sun/IBM/Compaq/HP, it is perfectly possible to run a news server on a PC running Linux or other i386-based Unix. News servers make very heavy use of disks so SCSI disks are preferable. More RAM would also speed things up, more than a faster processor.
The more disk space you give the server, the longer you will be able to keep news articles before they must be expired. Since a full feed is (at the time of writing) approaching 4GB/day, if you take a full feed, you would need 28GB of disk space (for the spool alone - indexing needs extra space) in order to store newsgroups for a week (a reasonable amount of time, since some users may only wish to read newsgroups once a week).
In general, the more IDE/SCSI buses you split your news disks across, the better your news server will perform; to have separate SCSI chains for your news spool, news library (database files) and news overview (indexes) is the ideal.
Also in general, the more people who read Usenet news at your site, the more RAM you will need. 256MB would provide a responsive system to a site with one or two hundred news readers per day.
A product such as Solstice DiskSuite, Veritas or equivalent makes managing the news spool area much easier since it can be configured as one large file system (spool being the area where actual articles are kept). In addition, if sufficient disk space is available, mirroring can be employed to increase availability. However, most small sites do not feel this is worthwhile due to the transient nature of Usenet news. By the same token, it is not normally considered necessary to make a tape backup of the news spool, except perhaps if you have any local newsgroups. (It is worth backing up all other parts of your news server, especially configuration files!)
The Unix operating system is more or less essential. It is possible to run a news service on Windows NT, but disk fragmentation quickly becomes a major problem and cannot be corrected while the service is online.
By far the most popular free news server software is InterNetNews (INN). The current stable version is 2.3.3, and it is recommended that if you are running an earlier version, especially one before INN 2.1, you should upgrade. INN provides everything you will need to accept a news feed, allow local users to read and post, and to feed local postings back to the backbone for onward propagation.
INN is complex to configure; see the extensive INN FAQ which is posted weekly to the newsgroup news.software.nntp or is available by FTP. Your feed site can also advise you if you find a problem which isn't covered in the FAQ.
Commercial alternatives include Netscape News Server, which is based on INN 1.4 and comes with a web-based control interface; and DNEWS, which is free to academic sites. DNEWS is significantly simpler to configure and control than INN, though it is still under development (thus may still have problems) and, being much less widely used, there will be less help available from the user community. It is available for NT and some UNIX platforms.
PGP is also strongly recommended so that you can automatically process control messages (such as those to create new groups). INN comes with the necessary PGP public keys.
At the time of writing, a full feed is approaching 4GB/day, which is equivalent to an average of 3-4 Mbit/s. However, many sites choose not to take a full feed. Simply excluding all "binaries" groups (official and unofficial), which carry non-text content such as pictures, reduces the bandwidth needed by around 80% - and therefore increases the length of time you can keep the remainder proportionately. This is a reasonable step since most binaries groups are archived at sites which users can access via the web and/or FTP.
Install your news server hardware and software. Apply to join the News Feed Service. When accepted you will need to configure your server to allow incoming connections from your primary and secondary feed servers, and to feed locally posted articles to those two servers. Your primary feed site will advise you of the names of these servers once you apply. If you run the INN software, your primary feed will also be able to give you detailed technical help with configuring the software.
Your feed site can provide you with an up-to-date breakdown of what groups exist within each hierarchy, in the form of the INN "active" file and "newsgroups" file. If you are setting up a local news server for the first time, you will need these to create the existing groups.
Your main responsibility will be to keep your news server running and accepting your news feed. The main element to software configuration is to control expiry of old news so that there is always some disk space to accept new articles. You have a great deal of flexibility in your expiration policy, allowing you to expire different groups faster or slower according to local needs. Apart from this, you will only need to ensure your server has enough resources to meet the demands of your local users, and stays running.
If your server is down, or running too slowly, your feed site will build up a backlog of Usenet news waiting to be sent to you. If this is the case for an unreasonable period of time (e.g. for more than a day or two), your feed site will have to start dropping some articles - they will never be sent. This will cause gaps in discussions and probably annoy your local readers. Your feed site will liaise with you if this is becomes necessary. Therefore, a further responsibility is to make sure that e-mail from your feed site is always dealt with promptly. You will be asked to create a newsmaster@yoursite.ac.uk alias, and redirect this if your normal contact person is away/on holiday/etc.
If you fail to respond to e-mail, or fail to modify your configuration (or upgrade your hardware) so that your server can keep up with the volume of the newsgroups you have asked for, your feed site may be forced to reduce your newsfeed unilaterally by dropping whole hierarchies.
If you carry any local newsgroups which are not intended to be propagated on the Internet, it is up to you to ensure that you do not feed them to the backbone. If you do, they WILL be passed on. You control what articles you transmit to the backbone; normally this will only be articles posted at your site. Note that the backbone reserves the right not to accept articles cross-posted to more than 8 groups, nor those over 400KB in size, as anti-spam measures.
Where JANET(UK) asks you to take action in regard to some incident, you are expected to respond promptly.
If you request to join the service, your feed site will need the following information from you:
There are currently six feed sites, located at:
though in the future there will be a move to place the feed sites at the JANET Core Points of Presence (C-PoPs).
When requesting to join the JANET News Feed Service, you will be allocated one of these sites to be your primary feed site, based on your geographical location but also designed to spread the load evenly across the backbone. Your primary feed site will be informed by JANET(UK) of your request and will liaise with you in both setting up the feed and any further issues you wish to raise.
Once your primary feed is in place, your primary feed site will also arrange your backup feed from another feed site.
The News Reader server is supported by the JANET News backbone, which
consists of powerful servers interconnected and receiving News from
a variety of feeds outside JANET, so that articles are available to
your users within a short time of their posting anywhere in the Internet.
All the major newsgroup hierarchies are available to you, and many others
that the JANET community has found helpful.
JANET's AUP states that JANET may not be used for the creation
or transmission of illegal material. The groups in the banned list have
been found to contain a significant number of articles likely to be
illegal. JANET routinely uses advice from the Internet
Watch Foundation (IWF) in identifying such material and removing
individual articles from other newsgroups.
Most News Reader programs will display for you the list of newsgroups
active on the server at the time.
Summaries of the amount and nature of the use you make of the News Reader
Service are available on the web. The statistics pages are password
protected, and organisations can only see their own statistics. A user
name and password are provided once an application has been accepted.
These reports, which are normally available on a daily basis, indicate
the number and volume of articles presented for reading, and the newsgroups
most commonly accessed. Usage statistics providing a history of one
year are available.
When a JANET site applies to use the News Reader Service, JANET(UK) arranges
for one of these reader servers to accept News client requests from
your networks, and advises you of the address to use.
You arrange for your users' News reading software to read from the server.
You may need to publish simple instructions for them or you may be able
to configure the software in use centrally. You should be aware that
if your users will read News through a local proxy or a firewall performing
Network Address Translation (NAT), changes to the configuration might
be required.
You may join the service via JCS or the web. Details on the procedure to join the service are available here.
You don't need any special hardware, and you can run any number of different news reading (NNRP) client software. This includes most web browsers, Trumpet and Gravity for Windows, or a wide choice of newsreaders for Unix such as nn, strn, slrn, Gnus etc.
Although it is not possible to make precise predictions about the additional network traffic that users will generate while reading News, it is likely to be comparable to the volume generated by a similar number of users browsing web pages.
If News-reading traffic reaches a level at which it is a problem in your internal network or on your JANET connection, you might consider the following, in order of likely benefit:
You undertake to support your own users, as described in 'support for your users'.
You will be responsible for ensuring that your user's software configuration is suitable for connecting across JANET to the reader server. If you offer a particular software product to your users then you should know how to configure personal or account details, and how to make it connect to the JANET server. There may be additional local complications.
Note that posting news is only allowed if your organisation asked for it. If not, your users may make complaints like 'When I click on "post" it says "Not allowed"', so your support staff should be ready to deal with this.
Where JANET(UK) asks you to take action in regard to some incident, you are expected to respond promptly.
If you request to join the service, the News Reader servers' manager will need the following information from you:
In a conventionally operated firewall you will have prevented News
access from your own site to the Internet, and you will need to permit
just enough to allow News reading. For the addresses which you wish
to have access to News, TCP packets should be allowed in the outbound
direction from any port to port 119 of the News Reader server or servers;
normally inbound TCP packets will be allowed for established connections,
and this is sufficient.
The server will recognise the IP address from which each connection
comes. It will translate the address to a domain name using PTR records
in the DNS, and will use that domain name to allow or deny access and
article posting to some or all newsgroups. You must ensure that the
necessary PTR records are in place. Typically the IP addresses you want
to specify will be in a single subnet and will already have A (address)
records in the zone for college.ac.uk of the form
pc1.room101 A abc.def.24.41
pc2.room101 A abc.def.24.42
pc3.room101 A abc.def.24.43
and so on up to (say)
pc25.room101 A abc.def.24.65
In that case you should have corresponding records in the DNS zone for
24.def.abc.in-addr.arpa such as
41 PTR pc1.room101.college.ac.uk
42 PTR pc2.room101.college.ac.uk
43 PTR pc3.room101.college.ac.uk
and so on up to
65 PTR pc25.room101.college.ac.uk
You can then specify your network for JANET News Reader Service purposes
as *.room101.college.ac.uk, using the '*' wildcard.
If there are other IP addresses and domain names in the same sequence
which are not to be included, you will need to devise some naming scheme
which enables the JANET News Reader Service server to distinguish between
the two categories. You might, for instance, use names such as pc1.nrs-room101.college.ac.uk
for addresses using the JANET News Reader Service and pc26.room101.college.ac.uk
for the rest, and then refer to the set you want as *.nrs-room101.college.ac.uk.
If you are not sure whether some particular scheme will work, ask JCS for advice.
If only a single system is to make direct contact with the server (as
will commonly be the case if you are using a firewall or proxy implementing
address translation) you need only set up a PTR record for the IP address
of the JANET side of that system, and specify it in your application.
