Putting Usenet News to Work: Four Usenet News Servers Tested By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Sm@rt Reseller Usenet is for every reseller. ISPs must say yes to Usenet, because users love it. But even if you’re not an ISP, there’s still money to be made in this oldest of all online discussion systems, which can serve as a local or distributed workgroup messaging solution. ("The Business of Usenet"). News servers have been around since long before the Internet became the messaging medium of corporate choice. They process up to tens of thousands of online discussion groups on every imaginable topic, relaying information between one another in big gobs. Usenet administrators can use as many or as few of these feeds as they like, or can forgo standard Usenet feeds entirely and use a server solely for workgroup discussions. The question, as always, is how to maximize your profits and your customers’ benefits. Or, to get to the nub of the matter, what should you look for in a news server and which one will work best for you? The news servers we looked at—Netwin’s DNEWS; the non-profit Internet Software Consortium’s InterNetNews (INN); Microsoft Usenet Server, part of the NT Option Pack; and Highwind Software’s Typhoon—run on virtually every major operating system in existence, and many minor ones. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The right server for you depends on your operating environment, how much bandwidth and hardware you have to devote to Usenet, and exactly what you want to accomplish. Usenet Requirements In addition, you must determine: How many readers will you have? How big a feed will you be getting from other Usenet news server peers? And how long will you be retaining news articles? At one end of the spectrum, tiny ISPs with limited news feeds of a thousand or so groups, and resellers supporting only local news groups, can get by using a server with 8 MB RAM, a 33MHz 486, a 56K net connection, and a gigabyte of hard drive. Sounds like nothing at all, doesn’t it? At the high end, however—35,000-plus newsgroups without any compromises—you’ll want a minimum of 256 MB RAM on the fastest architecture you can lay your hands on, terabytes of storage, and 2 to 3 megabit-per-second bandwidth. Evaluating Server Performance The most important performance test of a Usenet news server is its ability to respond to client request. However, since incorporating the numerous variables involved in serving news could create a test report several yards long, we opted for straightforward tests easily replicable by our readers. Our testbed consisted of a generic PCI-bus 120MHz Pentium server with 64 MB RAM, and five desktop clients. A constant news feed was pushed at the server using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), while our client machines constantly barraged the sever with requests for the full text of 100 different 2K messages in five different news groups. This methodology is, to say the least, far from perfect. Operating system caching, for example, clearly influences our results. Still, taken in context, our numbers do show how the different servers compare with each other in their raw capability to service readers. We also looked at accept and feed rates and transfer rates. To gauge these yourself, use your operating system’s monitor tools. Server OS Messages Per Second Typhoon Solaris 17.1 INN Solaris 10.1 DNews NT 9.8 NT Usenet NT 9.6 DNews Linux 8.9 DNews Solaris 8.8 INN Linux 8.7 Typhoon 3.0 Not sure where to start? We recommend you get 128MB RAM and a Pentium II or an UltraSPARC with at least 15 GB of hard disk. For connectivity, go with a T1. And no matter what kind of hardware you end up using, faster data I/O is always better. Ideally, you’d want to use a Wide Ultra2 SCSI controller with an 80Mbps transfer rate and a Fast Ethernet network interface card for internal corporate news distribution. What To Look For In Server Software Support is vital. News servers don’t go wrong often, but when they do their data bottlenecks make the LA rush hour look like wide-open highway. You need either a vendor that stands behind its product, or an experienced Usenet administrator. We found that support options for the reviewed products are all over the map. For example, INN has no official support at all. Although source code and megabytes of notes and commentary are available, you must have a news administrator who knows INN intimately, and who is comfortable looking to the Net for support. New Zealand’s Netwin offers only online support, but makes up for it by being by far the easiest news server to install and maintain. Microsoft’s entry is also easy to install, but Usenet places a distant last in the attention it’s given in the NT Option Pack documentation and support. And Highwind’s Typhoon had the best support of all reviewed products, with responsive and precise voice and online help. Performance is also vital. Optimization among program, operating system, and hardware is far more important than simple out-of-the-box performance. For example, Typhoon is clearly the fastest news server—when it’s running on Solaris. On Linux its performance was, to be polite, awful. The difference? Typhoon’s Solaris code is more mature, and untuned Solaris simply worked better with our test box (see "Evaluating Server Performance", left) than untuned Linux. Give any of these news servers fast hardware and a tuned operating system, and you’ll see uniformly good performance except at the very highest traffic levels. In our tests, all servers finished in a dead heat except for Typhoon, which registered both best (Solaris) and worst (Linux). We highly recommend that you test these servers out yourself. All are available in either freeware or fully functional trialware formats from the Web. However, the best performance in the world won’t do you any good without stability. Fortunately, both in our tests and in real world experience, all these servers are rock solid. When problems do happen with news servers, it is almost always a hardware problem. News servers beat the heck out of drive arrays, and any flaw will show up in a hurry. With Usenet, RAID isn’t just a good idea: It’s a requirement. Finally, expandability and scalability are unavoidable issues when hosting Usenet. You can usually handle potential challenges by simply throwing more hardware at the problem. INN makes this process easy, but you have to know the program well to do it right. DNews and Typhoon make expansion mindlessly simply. In Microsoft’s case, it’s not even an option: Option Pack’s Usenet is restricted from the get-go to in-house-only Usenet groups. If you want full Usenet capability, you must get Microsoft Commercial Internet System’s Usenet server. Company Internet Software Consortium Highwind Software Microsoft Netwin Product INN 1.72 Typhoon 1.0 NT Option Pack - NNTP Services Dnews 4.5f Web Address www.isc.org/ www.highwind.com/

typhoon.html www.microsoft.com/

ntserver/guide/

whatisntop.asp netwinsite.com/

dnews.htm Key Features Source code available Fast, anti-spam, virtual servers Works hand in glove with Back-Office services Low system requirements; spam filtering Pricing Free $495 $99.95 on CD, free download $485 OS Most Unix Irix Solaris NT 4.0, SP3 and up Most Unix, Mac OS NetWare, OS/2, VMS multinet, Windows 95, NT DNews Netwin’s not kidding when they say you can get DNews up within an hour. We managed it with 20 minutes to spare from a cold start. The DNews server also requires the least system resources of any of server. Using dynamic pull feeds, rudely described as "suck" in the program, DNews was the one server that could actually run on 486 boxes with a few hundred megabytes of disk room. DNews is perfect for customers who want the most news with the least hardware. But easy setup and low hardware requirements don’t mean that DNews is a cut-rate server. We found all the features you’d want from a news server, such as full group access control, simple and fast control of how fast messages should expire from your system, and easy setup of private newsgroups. DNews can’t, however, be a major Usenet news peer: The program can’t go above 60GBs of message, or spool, storage. Still, for corporate news sites and small ISPs, DNews is an ideal choice. The Business of Usenet Many ISPs and resellers see Usenet and its 30,000-plus online discussion groups with millions of messages a day as the bane of their bandwidth. Get real. There are profits to be made from Usenet services and servers—and it’s not just from time charges for Usenet fanatics. For non-ISP resellers, as well as for ISPs, private Usenet groups are an inexpensive way of providing businesses with online discussion groups. Groupware programs like Lotus Notes provide these services as well, but cost far more. Usenet allows you to give your customers private online discussion capabilties at an inexpensive rate. Better still, with Usenet’s comparatively-low costs and stable server and client software, you can harvest greater profits than you might by providing the same basic functionality using either Web-based or groupware solutions. If you’re an ISP, you’ll know that traditional Usenet services are wildly popular. You know the drill: When your news server goes down, the help desk lines light up a minute later. Of course, with today’s huge Internet community, Usenet isn’t easy to manage. Usenet servers demand substantial disk and throughput resources, to the point where many ISPs would rather not deal with the hassle. The solution? Virtual Service Providers (VSPs) like Randori Communications, Real News, and Supernews, which provide ISP Usenet services. The VSP simply redirects the ISP’s Usenet server DNS entries to the Usenet provider’s sites. Done right, ISP users won’t notice anything except improved services. This can be a win-win situation where both ISP and VSP make money. INN InterNetNews, while possibly still the most popular news server around, is seeing the end of its days. The latest version, 1.72, is still shaking off the problems of last year, when a major security hole was discovered and a supposed cure failed. Don’t get us wrong: In the right hands, INN is great. It’s just that to really do INN well, you’ll need a news administration that really knows the program, operating environment, shell programming and the C programming language. Of course, administrators like this are out there, but wouldn’t you rather have them working on more lucrative assignments than maintaining news? INN is complicated server, and you must actively seek assistance to install it properly and keep it running smoothly. If you are going to use INN, you’ll need a copy of Spencer & Lawrence’s "Managing Usenet" and set a bookmark now for the masterfully-done FAQ file. So much for the news INN fans didn’t want to hear. On the plus side, INN is by far the most customizable of all the servers, in the right hands and within its confines. Unfortunately, some features we feel modern news servers need aren’t yet included. For example, you still can’t feed multiple articles to downstream sites simultaneously without a lot of shell programming. INN isn’t going to disappear. But unless you already have an INN wizard at hand, there’s no pressing reason to use it today. Typhoon Why is INN fading? In large part, it’s Highwind Software’s fault. Cyclone has quickly become the server of choice for major Usenet news providers due to its exceptional speed and durability. Highwind’s low-end product, Breeze, is becoming very popular for small offices, and the midrange Typhoon comfortably occupies the needs of everyone else. The feature that’s going to catch most people’s eye is Typhoon’s support for virtual news servers. These can be set to almost any combination of user access and restricted news feeds. You can do this with other servers if you want to sweat, but Typhoon gives you both easy and unparalleled control over customer news feeds. There’s a lot more to like besides this and Typhoon’s great speed. Anti-spam controls are built into the server, so there’s no need to look for a third-party anti-spam filter. Combine this with detailed usage statistics—great for billing clients by service volume—and intelligent, automatic caching and disk storage routines, and you’ve got the head of the Usenet class. Option Pack Usenet Server Tucked away inside of Option Pack—known better to some as the full Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 package—is a decent little Usenet server. But unlike the other reviewed products, it’s not a dual-purpose Usenet news and private news server. Instead, it can only deliver local news. That just may be enough for certain users’ needs. Unlike the rest of the Option Pack, the Usenet server doesn’t take up a lot of system resources. While badly supported by Microsoft, the Usenet program is even easier to use and install than DNews. We confess that when we installed Option Pack with all the bells and whistles the first time, we almost didn’t notice it going on the disk. The program may be small, but it’s as fast as most of our tested servers. Without full news facilities, it doesn’t have all the features of other servers, but for an internal solution it doesn’t have to. After all, if you’ve got people spamming each other inside the company intranet, you’re going to need to fire them, not filter them. For full Usenet services with all Microsoft services, you must get MCIS and Option Pack to cooperate. But if your customers are total converts to Microsoft BackOffice, approach them with a custom pairing of Exchange Server and Option Pack Usenet. The Best of the Bunch Each of the tested programs has its niche. If you already have INN expertise, there’s no need to look elsewhere. But there’s also no compelling reason to switch to it. DNews is a handy system that’s great for small environments. And the NT Option Pack may be all the Usenet your Microsoft customers need for their internal corporate sites. To get the most out of Usenet, though, you’ll need the most server, and that’s Typhoon. Typhoon should take the news server world by storm. We’ve seen news servers since the prehistory of the Net, and Typhoon’s the best there is. Its only real competitors are the other Highland Software news servers. And though some Microsoft-centric customers may hesitate about a solution that doesn’t run on Windows NT, they shouldn’t. You can tell them the simple truth: Typhoon’s the fastest, strongest and most feature-filled news server on the market for today and for the foreseeable future.