• Joined Retronet Neo and progress

    From Dave to All on Sun Jul 24 07:12:04 2022

    I've joined us to RetroNet Neo - a network for fans of retro computing. It's fairly new and fairly quiet but it's there. Currently awaiting messages to transfer across. Using QWK, that can take a few runs for not much.. it at least runs 48 times per day.
    Sunday mornings see a process that ties up the board for a few hours culling a lot of older messaging; I've modified that to kick off a lot earlier than it was (5am), so some of the processing is a little behind.

    I've opened up the node count to allow 12 simultaneous users. We'll never need it. We've also got more RAM and CPU allocated than we're ever going to use. We're currently idling around 750MB (largely due to the Newslink process that basically finishes in time to start again) and the CPU load is negligible. Especially with 8 vCPUs attached to it.

    Usenet is a work in progress - we're down below 7000 groups. I'm still seeing a lot of failure warnings when Newslink tries to update some of them. At some stage I'll pipe that output into a makeshift log, then let my friends Awk and Sed produce me a meaningful list of groups to nuke.
    I have something of an ethical conundrum with culling Usenet; I'm an old school gray beard type, so I'm loathe to enforce censorship or remove anything that I don't find personally relevant. At the same time, I've been around Usenet since the 90s - I know what lies below the surface, so I've had to make decisions around resourcing (no binaries), legalities (no binaries), all whilst trying to cut out some of the utter junk out from the decades that Usenet has been a complete wasteland in hope of trying to get us down to moderately active and meaningful newsgroups (though not always of relevance to everyone).