4 Jun
2011
4 Jun
'11
2:29 p.m.
From madodel at ptdprolog.net Sat Jun 4 21:24:22 2011
> How many members of the student body even knew in
2010 that Duke
> maintained an active news server?
Does that even matter? Maybe it wasn't accessible outside their network.
BTW New Mexico State University still maintains the
hobbes.nmsu.edu
server even though almost everyone there probably has no clue as to what
ftp (though most access is through http now) is and probably no idea what
DOS or OS/2 is. Every few years they ask for donations and people
actually always donate more then what is required so they assign a few
students to maintain it. The cost is negligible but the historic value
is unimaginable for those looking for old OS/2 and DOS freeware/shareware
programs.
The difference is Hobbes is an archive, it's not usenet. Unless they set up
mirrors if they go away everything they have goes with them. Not so with
usenet, it's a totally separate issue.
I don't understand why Duke couldn't do the
same for it's Usenet server.
Why would they have to? Usenet is a peering network. Theoretically
everything they have is also on other servers. The point of usenet is no
individual server needs to exist. It's better if there are more just to
distribute the load but no usenet server that operates correctly is
indispensible since it should be passing all its articles to other servers.
Usenet servers are supposed to be able to come and go without impacting
anybody and without loss of data.