From Newsgroup: news.admin.peering
On Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:05:40 +0000, Schlomo Goldberg wrote:
Nigel Reed <sysop@endofthelinebbs.com> writes:
This server has now been removed.
I don't know what software you're using, but INN don't actually "pools" articles, it "pools" pointers to articles. Overhead is minimal, probably
less than if you were running screensaver on your server. Since a lot of people in this day and age lost interest in Usenet, they don't check
their servers very often (or at all). I wouldn't remove any peers unless
they disappeared for year or more, and there is no hope for them ever
coming back.
I beg to differ, if someone vanishes for months and refuses to let you
know, bringing us to contact them (we shouldnt have to) and respond to
emails there comes a point in time that you say well if you cant be
fucked, neither can I.
Our peering policy states a month from memory, but thats linear in
reality, if your a new peer, I'll contact you, give you a few weeks, no reponse, I terminate it. if like mixmin, a peer I (and probably many of
us) had for many many years, I ended up giving Steve over 4 months (and several unanswered emails) before I removed his.
and that "reference file", yes, cant talk for INN, but the peers MID list
in DNews can really just be ignored, because it has a safeguard that at
10MB (default, variable) it wipes and starts fresh, so if they come back
in 6 months they wont get a full backlog, only since the MID list last
rolled over.
But why should it get to that stage, people get sick of it, people go
into politics and so disable their peering letting their server rot away
(/me looks at Steve), and we all know shit happens, but it takes 15
seconds to click reply on email and say "catastrophic failure, might take
some time to get it fixed" in such cases, I let it go and might check on
it in a couple months, or same amount of time and energy to tell their
peers "i'm shutting down" or ""peering no longer required" ... but if you ignore us... you're fair game.
Something they often forget it, they give up now, and in a few years time
they want to restart and try asking for peering again, problem there is
most of us tend to have good memories, especially when it comes to high
or bad risks, so offend them when we decline and they cant understand it.
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