Jon,I previously mentioned INN. INN is a free news server for Unix/Linux. I was running it on a RedHat system here at home for about a year and a half before I shut the server down. You don't mention whether you want the news server to be push or pull on the news feed.....but I've only used INN in a push fashion. Most news administrators seem to prefer push feeds, as it impacts the server less than pull feeds.
As I mentioned previously, free space is not the biggest problem with an INN setup. Since each article is stored as a separate file, you run more of a risk consuming all for free inodes before you run out of actual space, particularly on larger drives. This is overcome by rebuilding the filesystem with more inodes per capacity, but this might not be an easy remedy on a server appliance such as the Raq. Not knowing how much news you actually intend to maintain locally (number of newsgroups, number of feeds, retention policies, etc), it's hard to say for certain whether the Raq is your best fit for this server.
INN is also fairly memory intensive, so for larger sites it really prefers to be it's own dedicated server. INN is free, and is also fairly common, so finding online support should be simple.
At 09:44 AM 10/30/00 +0000, you wrote:
In response to the recent replies about News servers - I should have put in more detail in my original email. Currently we're running an old news server on an NT box (DNews), but we want to scrap the NT box and put more onto the two Raq 3 boxes we've got. The current news server emulates a news client, so I believe that it only pulls down articles that people request. The current NT box has its data on a 2.50Gb drive with 2.4Gb free (the drive is compressed). We serve News to our internal VPN, currently the audience is around 500 people (not everyone uses it), but will increase to 1500 over the next year or so. I think one of our main requirements is that it should be free! The Raq 3 box is currently running DNS and has loads of space free.