Hi Phillip:
Well, it hasn't fixed your spelling
No, seriously... The msnews server is the "hosting" server for these
newsgroups.
You could think of it as the "master" or "home" server, from which every
other news server in the world will get the content for these groups. Which
will mean that you will see messages as much as ten days sooner on this
server as you will on any other.
Typically, my posts return to me five or ten minutes after posting.
Much more importantly, other users around the world will see YOUR posts as
soon as they possibly can. There is no longer a danger that someone will
miss your answer because they were waiting for it to trundle across the
internet and onto the master server.
Now, what I just said is not quite technically accurate.
To begin with, the Microsoft msnews server is not a single computer: it's a
whole roomful of them, known as a "server farm". I don't know of anyone who
has managed to get the details of exactly what the composition of the
Microsoft server farm is. You won't easily find out even WHERE it is (if
you said "Redmond" you're probably wrong...) The details are as closely
guarded a secret as Google's hardware configuration is.
You may wish to take my word for it that it's one of the largest Intel
systems ever built. I believe it's a cluster of either eight or 16 servers,
but I'm not sure whether each box has 16 or 32 processors. I do know that
I'm glad I am not paying its electricity bill...
Now: This is a USENET server. USENET (User Network) was the very very
earliest beginning of the Internet. USENET pre-dates the World Wide Web and
Email by several years
It was designed (quite literally) to survive a
nuclear war. Which means that the "concept" of a Home Server is actually
wrong.
There is no central host in USENET. What we have is a "spider web" of
computers in a peer-to-peer relationship with each other. Thousands of
them. You put a post into one of the servers, and it bounces around being
passed from server to server until it has passed through every computer at
every intersection in the spider web. This process can take as many as ten
days...
For speed and efficiency, what a lot of news servers do is to ensure that
they "peer" directly with large servers such as the Microsoft one. Every
four hours or so, they pull down all the latest posts directly from the
Microsoft server. This distorts the original spider web, but it ensures
that most news servers are only one or two hops away from the Microsoft one.
So users connected direct to Microsoft will see your postings almost
immediately: in just the time it takes the Microsoft servers to pass the
post amongst themselves (two to five minutes). Users connected to ordinary
news servers will see your post within a day or so if you post it to the
Microsoft server. If you post to a normal news server, it will be two or
three days getting up to msnews, and two or three more coming back to the
user looking for your answer.
Apart from that, the only benefit I can think of is that if you are directly
connected to the msnews server, you will see almost no Spam. A lot of
serious science went into the anti-spam robot that runs on the Microsoft
news server. It works very well. As you saw, when it went down over the
weekend and we screamed like stuck pigs because we saw three Spam messages.
We're quite unused to seeing Spam: it offends our genteel sensibilities
Cheers
Okay I am subscribed to the msnews Server.
Now hat advantages doe it impart?
Refresh your group list. There's 2,551 of groups on that server, including
this one
In Entourage, click the news server then click Update List.
I am also subscribed to msnews.microsoft.com but can't find these groups
on that. Only the groups about macros That You told people about a
couple of years ago plus one other I thought sounded interesting are on
that. There are other but they sound more like they are for IT managers,
and PC only people.
John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] wrote:
Hi Phillip:
Which news server are you connected to?
There was an issue with the spam robot on the Microsoft news server farm
over the weekend. They got it fixed Tuesday-ish.
The Microsoft server is vast: there are at least eight multi-processor
systems in a loosely-coupled network. "Some" of the servers got the spam,
others didn't.
Then again, most of our customers are connected through either the Google,
Yahoo, or Microsoft web interfaces. The Microsoft one queries the master
news server, the Google and Yahoo ones have local storage. So things get a
bit complex.
If you connect directly to Microsoft you will almost never see spam. This
time, we did, which is why we jumped on it so loudly
cheers
On 2/8/06 6:14 AM, in article
[email protected],
Well not exactly I had to mark a bunch read few minutes ago but,a lot
less though . ;-)
John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] wrote:
Hi Phillip:
Yeah, the spam Robot must have been down for maintenance ... It has
munched
them now...
-------------------------snip-------------------------
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
