news server question 3186
Quite frankly, the best approach to Usenet news is not to try running your own server, or your own archive. All that either of those will do in increase the propagation latency, failure rate, and maintenance time.
Get a good Internet connection.
Get a good newsreader. 1) Gnus under emacs 2) slrn 3) tin
Get a good news server. Newsguy.com, Supernews.com, or something equivalent.
Use the Google archive
First lets note that your level of expertise is significantly higher than average, which means 1) the maintenance time is...
Newsreaders are of course a very subjective opinion, everybody likes what they use and doesn't like what they haven't tried. The *fact* is that Gnus is the most flexible-powerful of them all, but of course that doesn't mean it suits you or your needs the best. For a strickly light weight text based reader, slrn is probably as good as it gets, but... as above, it might not suit you. Hence use a grain of salt on my opinion, and everyone elses, and go try a few until you find one that you are both comfortable with and that does what you need.
I've inherited a build process that creates a filesystem-in-a-file using a bash script which goes, in part, like this: dd if=-dev-zero of=fsfile bs=1024 count=4096 mke2fs -F...
The trick with servers is to find something reliable, and many ISPs look only for something inexpensive. I've used both newsguy and supernews for several years. My ISP was using a very good server that was actually better than either of them, so I dropped supernews (only because I have my web page on newsguy), but the ISP recently switched to supernews so I'm back to using it again. Regardless, if your ISP doesn't provide a good server, subsribe to one yourself; or do that anyway just to have access to *two* good servers.
Google of course keeps diddling with the way they present the archive, and each time it seems to get worse rather than better. But it is still more useful than anything you'll create for your own use!
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Linux groups from Newsgroups