?Question: Where is Usenet Stored?
Subject: Re: ?Question: Where is Usenet Stored?
From: benedikt@devnull.ping.de (Benedikt Stockebrand)
In article <95004.102947DWM7@psuvm.psu.edu> D.W. Moore writes:
| Can someone explain this in non-technical terms: Where are active Usenet
| messages stored? Is there some big host computer somewhere that holds
| all the messages in all 10,000 groups? Are they scattered around? I
| know my sysadmin at PSUVM has to download to update the groups, but from
| where does he download? Am I even asking the right questions, or am i
| missing something?
No, there's no single central "big host computer". Instead there are
many (something around 60 000?)
not-quite-so-big-but-still-too-big-to-buy-one-just-for-the-fun-of-it "host computers" that are connected to
some others. Say it looks like this (in a very small scale):
A -------- B -------- C -------- D -------- E ( I just LOVE )
\ / | / ( these ASCII )
\ / | / ( pictures :-) )
\ / | /
\ / | /
F -------------- G ------------- H
Assume you post an article to A. Then A will ask both B and F if
they've already got a copy of your article. Since they obviously don't
A will send them a copy. Now B and F continue that game, B copying it
to C and F copying it to G and so on. Eventually your article reaches
all other hosts (called news servers) and everyone on the net can read
your posting. After a couple of days the news servers "expire" your
posting, i.e. they delete them to get some disk space for new
postings.
If you want to know some more about this, take a look at the periodic
postings in news.announce.newusers. I'm sure you'll find lots of
interesting information about the Net.
Ben
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Benedikt (Ben) Stockebrand (benedikt@devnull.ping.de) Dortmund, Germany
And don't tell me about Benedict Arnold anymore...
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