Research & Development

Usenet News

Project Journal

10/19/97 MLL

INN Fire Engine is now freely available in binary form and source will be released soon. We currently have 104 news peers. We have been hovering around position 50 for the last few months.

6/21/97 MLL

We currently have 92 news peers. We are currently at position 47 in the May Freenix top 1000. After hitting position 47 at the end of May we turned the number of streams down from 10 to 1 on most of our news peers because at one point towards the end of May our primary news server was consuming about 20 Mbps of bandwidth sustained, with peaks at 24 Mbps. This adjustment is temporary and will be undone in about 3 months.

5/8/97 MLL

We currently have 52 news peers. We are currently at position 80 in the April Freenix top 1000. The most important news is that we have created a special version of INN and innfeed which we call INN Fire Engine and Firehose. We haven't spent any time pursuing news sessions with the top news servers. Probably will do so to help our standing. In other words, we got to postion 80 by default. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, we took most of the drives OUT of our news server. The new software we run is completely memory based.

1/8/97 MLL

We currently have 33 news peers. We are now at position 74 in the December Freenix top 1000. We have upgraded to INN 1.5.1.

12/8/96 MLL

We currently have 30 news peers. Earlier today we had a record outgoing stream of news of 9.6 megabits per second. We have added a new Diagnostics section.

12/3/96 MLL

We currently have 28 news peers. We are now at position 123 in the November Freenix top 1000. We upgraded to INN 1.5 Final two days ago.

11/28/96 MLL

Journal started. Items to note: We currently have 26 news peers, with Netcom still pending. Last month we debuted in the Freenix top 1000 at position 197 (!). At that time we had only 14 news peers and were running stock innfeed code.

Project Overview

Hurricane Electric runs a high performance experimental Usenet news server.

We have multiple goals:

• To run a World Class Usenet news server cluster.
• To demonstrate this can be done using Linux.
• To do this with common (albeit high end) Intel hardware.
• To do highly experimental software engineering with Usenet news software.

Current Performance Statistics

• 100 base TX Ethernet Port (Updated Every 10 Minutes)
• firehose.status (Updated Every 5 Minutes)
• Daily Article Stats Counts/Sizes/Volume (Updated Nightly 00:00:00 PST)

Remote News Server Diagnostics

We have added a remote news server diagnostics tool to help Newsmasters that we exchange news with diagnose potential connectivity/permission to talk problems. This tool enables them to test from our end using traceroute and by telnetting to their servers NNTP port from our news server via a CGI script.

• Remote News Server Diagnostics Tool

Software Configuration

• Linux Kernel 2.0.30
• Slackware Distribution 3.1
• Updated libc
• INN Fire Engine
• Firehose

Hardware Configuration

• 266 Mhz Pentium 2
• 256 MB RAM
• 100 base TX 3com Vortex Ethernet Card
• 2 x 2 GB FAST+WIDE SCSI HD
• Buslogic FAST+WIDE PCI Bus SCSI Drive Controller

Project People

• Maniac Newsmaster: Gary Shaver gshaver@he.net
• Maniac Software Engineer: Mike Leber

Special Recognition Goes To

• All the hardworking Newsmasters that exchange news with us.
  "What? Our server's throttling?! Aww, man..."
• The innfeeders; especially James Brister.
  (What we call the people on the innfeed mailing list.)

Interesting Usenet News Related Links

• Hurricane Electric INN Fire Engine
• Internet Software Consortium INN Page
• Freenix top 1000 news servers worldwide by propagation of articles

Copyright © 1996 Hurricane Electric. All Rights Reserved.