Where do you want to go tomorrow?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pavel A.
  • Start date Start date
Pavel said:
Dear users of msnews.microsoft.com,

There are rumors that Microsoft plans to shut down this nntp server.

See this for example:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20004109-56.html

Any thoughts on where we can migrate from here - besides of the
web-based MSDN forums?.
To Google groups, maybe?

Regards,
-- pa
Click to expand...


Technically what Microsoft is stopping is the Microsoft.* newsgroups
in lieu of new forums style messages which can also be exposed as
"locally published" newsgroups.

As "Forums Newsgroups," you can download the MS NNTP Bridge

http://connect.microsoft.com/MicrosoftForums

that will allow you to continue to use your favorite desktop news
reader to access the Microsoft Forums Newsgroups.

It actually works pretty well. Not all the old newsgroup "names" are
available in the MS forums. There is the kernel one:

Microsoft.en-US.kernel

I'm sure in time that other providers will use the MS NNTP Bridge with
NNTP gating software to mirror the MS Forums on their own NNTP servers
as newsgroups.

Its leaves us to wonder what will happen to the old mirrors, i.e.
Google Groups. That probably depends if Microsoft will allow or not
their name sake and branding to continue to be used as newsgroup names
run by 3rd party servers. Maybe they don't care, maybe they don't
realize they will care once its highly abused more than it is now
where there was filtering going on, but no longer. :)
 
Hector said:
Technically what Microsoft is stopping is the Microsoft.* newsgroups in
lieu of new forums style messages which can also be exposed as "locally
published" newsgroups.

As "Forums Newsgroups," you can download the MS NNTP Bridge

http://connect.microsoft.com/MicrosoftForums

that will allow you to continue to use your favorite desktop news reader
to access the Microsoft Forums Newsgroups.

It actually works pretty well. Not all the old newsgroup "names" are
available in the MS forums. There is the kernel one:

Microsoft.en-US.kernel

I'm sure in time that other providers will use the MS NNTP Bridge with
NNTP gating software to mirror the MS Forums on their own NNTP servers
as newsgroups.

Its leaves us to wonder what will happen to the old mirrors, i.e. Google
Groups. That probably depends if Microsoft will allow or not their name
sake and branding to continue to be used as newsgroup names run by 3rd
party servers. Maybe they don't care, maybe they don't realize they
will care once its highly abused more than it is now where there was
filtering going on, but no longer. :)
Click to expand...

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the nntp bridge "works pretty well."
At least on T'Bird 2.x, the headers and bodies occasionally become
unsynced and the unread message indicator is unreliable.
 
Hi Pavel!
Any thoughts on where we can migrate from here - besides of the
web-based MSDN forums?.
Click to expand...

Why not just stay here?
You only need to use a different news-server than news.microsoft.com.
But the group will still exist in the future. And the groups will still
be peered to other news-servers.
NNTP is a peer-to-peer system, so the down of news.microsoft.com will
not matter.

So just change your news-provider and everything will work as today.

--
Greetings
Jochen

My blog about Win32 and .NET
http://blog.kalmbachnet.de/
 
Hello everyone,

Pavel A. wrote:
<snip>
As "Forums Newsgroups," you can download the MS NNTP Bridge

http://connect.microsoft.com/MicrosoftForums

that will allow you to continue to use your favorite desktop news reader
to access the Microsoft Forums Newsgroups.

It actually works pretty well. Not all the old newsgroup "names" are
available in the MS forums. There is the kernel one:
Click to expand...

Down anyone have more insight as to how the nntp bridge works with
regards to authenticating the user? I wonder how it deals with my live
ID user name and password and whether it is safe to use it with the same
live ID credentials that I use to access my technet plus subscription or
msdn subscriber downloads, or if this might reveal my credentials to
wiretappers. All information it exposes in its UI is that it obviously
accesses
http://social.microsoft.com/ForumsServicePreview/ForumsService.svc. Note
that this is an http URL, not https.
 
Yes, I did noticed that, and AFAICT, the REST requests are all HTTP.

Note: the correct url is:
http://services.social.microsoft.com/forumsServicePreview/ForumsService.svc

This is a primitive 3rd party program. The author seems to be new at
communications requirements. It uses the Live ID Framework Client
SDK for this.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb404791.aspx

And it comes with a C# example illustrating the authentication.

For me, since my live id account is a junk account anyway, I don't
worry about it - although they are beginning to force me to use it
more now.
 
Jochen said:
Hi Pavel!


Why not just stay here?
You only need to use a different news-server than news.microsoft.com.
But the group will still exist in the future. And the groups will still
be peered to other news-servers.
Click to expand...


But there is a main HOP source. There still needs to a common source.
NNTP is a peer-to-peer system, so the down of news.microsoft.com will
not matter.

So just change your news-provider and everything will work as today.
Click to expand...

And given the fact that the new systems were not merged anyway, the
only real lost is the Microsoft NNTP server. That is a big lost as
not everyone wants to go OUTSIDE the Microsoft server and other
services will be lost too.

So it will be a big change from that standpoint.

A good solid bridge is all that is needed to use the new storage
forums. This 3rd party bridge "works" but still has issues and is
missing many basic features.
 
Jochen Kalmbach said:
Hi Pavel!


Why not just stay here?
You only need to use a different news-server than news.microsoft.com.
But the group will still exist in the future. And the groups will still be
peered to other news-servers.
NNTP is a peer-to-peer system, so the down of news.microsoft.com will not
matter.

So just change your news-provider and everything will work as today.

--
Greetings
Jochen

My blog about Win32 and .NET
http://blog.kalmbachnet.de/
Click to expand...

Thank you Jochen and Mr. Burn,

I share concerns expressed by Hector Santos, that MS won't like Google
or others carrying their newsgroups. The distributed and free Usenet has its
merits,
but these techical NGs are focused on Microsoft ecosystem, so naturally
they better should stay with Microsoft.
If we can continue to use newsreaders rather than web interface (with all
due respect to AJAX....)
and still conect to the central MS server, then this bridge indeed looks
like a good solution for me.

Thanks,
-- pa
 
Jochen Kalmbach said:
Hi Hector!


No. NNTP is a peer-to-peer system... there is no "main"...
Click to expand...

Jochen, we are vendors of NNTP software. In addition, we are providers of
newsgroups for our technical support where we have other customers gating
the technical support news mail into their servers and so on.

Of course there is a MAIN source. It has to start from somewhere. Most
PEERS are going to start with the MAIN source, others will use a mirror.
The topology is more like a star network where you main have many hubs. But
there is a main HUB source which is not going to be gating to other servers.

In other words, if you post on the MAIN (Microsoft), they are not exporting
it to others - others servers are importing it. And so on.

That means once this main hub is lost, so are its end users. They will have
to go to another hub, but these hubs will now lose the MAIN source of input.
Exactly!
Click to expand...

Plus the lost of the nodes (users) off the star hub.

Do not take it for granted the that world of users take complete openness to
user external or 3rd party servers as a given.

Maybe I'm old school but there are MANY people who prefer to stick with the
resources and solutions that Microsoft offers. There is a reason why they
even bothered to post the announcement here, even though the storage was
already separate from the new MS Forums storage and they already have began
to create and migrate customers there.

Quite frankly if I was more aware of the fact that the two storages were not
one, I probably would of left this venue long ago. Buts that me, I'm old
school - I don't use 3rd party solutions. Its either Microsoft or we write
it.

That said, the MS related information has grown rich outside of Microsoft
so it does help many and for that reason, maybe, it won't change much.

You would hope not, but you don't know for sure until the plug is actually
pulled from the wall and people actually began to feel that something is no
longer the same.

That is why the NNTP Bridge is important for Microsoft. My only concern
there is that it's a 3rd party tool and they might be underestimating how
important it will be for to minimize the impact on people's long time usage
of the Microsoft NNTP based newsgroups.
 
Example:

You are ASSUMING that if you use server XYZ, that it will propagate to
all the HUBS when one one is pulled from the star network.


N5 U1 U2
| | /
N4-N3-N2 -- N0 -- U3
| | \
N6 N1 Ui
|
N8 - N8 - N9 - N11 - N12
|
N10


If you consider Microsoft is N0 with its thousands of Ui users, once
N0is gone, N1 and N2 will lost its source.

Now, yes, N2 and N1 will will have to get different hubs. But there
is now a HUGE lost of N0 information. And lets not assume
google.groups is pulling mail from another source other than N0. If
google is N1, N2 and its star chain is LOST.
 
hector said:
Of course there is a MAIN source. It has to start from somewhere. Most
PEERS are going to start with the MAIN source, others will use a mirror.
The topology is more like a star network where you main have many hubs.
But there is a main HUB source which is not going to be gating to other
servers.
Click to expand...

That is certainly not my (and many others, I'm sure) understanding of
the Usenet network. It may have been a star network in the very early
days but it is now, and has for quite a while been described as a mesh
network.

John
 
John said:
That is certainly not my (and many others, I'm sure) understanding of
the Usenet network. It may have been a star network in the very early
days but it is now, and has for quite a while been described as a mesh
network.
Click to expand...


Ok, first, the microsoft.public.* newsgroups are not usenet.

Second, call it what it want, it is still the same thing. A mesh is
just a form of a star network.

No matter what you can wish to call it, it requires coordination and
each node knowing who are their Uplinks and Downlinks which is what
experts in the mail distribution market, who still run the show, know
it as. Otherwise you will have redundancy (and hence duplicity).

An uplink is who you send data too, and downlink is who you get data from.

Now, in a mesh, redundancy may be part of the expectation with
duplicity considered a lower overhead operation then it was in other
days where hardware did did not allow for such low efficiency however
it still needed to be checked.

In a well coordinated network, to minimize duplicity, the nodes are
usually going to go to a more centralize hub (lets call it MAIN). If
the Nodes are going to also serve as HUBS for others, then they better
have dupe checking because they don't KNOW if their own nodes are also
using the MAIN hub.

In general, old and current, every node has a list of remote host they
will connect too to IMPORT and EXPORT information.

If you wish to see the PATH a messge takes from any server, see the
Path: header in a newsgroup article.

Viewing your message from the Microsoft NNTP server, I see:

Path: TK2MSFTNGP01.phx.gbl!TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl

That means that it was posted at

TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl

but it was also imported to:

TK2MSFTNGP01.phx.gbl

You can tell it was posted at TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl because of the
message-ID: header:

Message-ID: <[email protected]>

Now if I go to google groups and see your message from there, I see
(all one line)

Path: g2news1.google.com!
news1.google.com!
news.glorb.com!
feeder.erje.net!
weretis.net!
feeder1.news.weretis.net!
TK2MSFTNGP01.phx.gbl!
TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl

Starting from the bottom, the feeder1.news.weretis.net! server it
pulled from Microsoft TK2MSFTNGP01.phx.gbl! and it was gated thru a
number of 5 additional servers.

Well, #1 once the MS servers goes down, Google will not be able to
pull from TK2MSFTNGP01.phx.gbl! It will have find some thing else.

#2, you won't have MS server to post, and if you found another, you
don't know if Google will be pulling from it or that your Serer will
be posting to GOOGLE.

So no matter want you wish to call it, there is is a "backbone"
concept where there is a main hub who is normally known as the OWNER
of the newsgroup.

In regards to USENET, this is different issue. This is in industry
sponsored backbone. Not one company ones it. Its like a DNS.
Everyone has it access to add and remove from it. As long as you have
have primary uplink you can act as a primary server as well.

Anyway, with usenet, long ago, we requested an alt.* group for usenet,
It still exist:

alt.bbs.wildcat

We abandoned it long ago around 1997 when it became a high volume of
spam for us and the anonymous dirt was not something we wanted to
bother with our customers with when it was gated into our support
avenues.

The only reason we had no problem abandoning it was because it wasn't
our NEWSGROUP. We were not the main hub for it.

Thats not the case here with Microsoft.* newsgroup. These are not
usenet groups. The main hub was Microsoft where others pulled from.

Now, if someone were to migrate all the microsoft.public.* groups into
usenet groups, then you and Jochen would be correct, it wouldn't
matter if the Microsoft NNTP servers goes down because they would be
just a node off the backbone, not the main hub for it.

Hey, who knows, Maybe Google's answer to this Microsoft dropping of
their NNTP server would be to announce their own services to be
available. But they don't want people off the web for the same reason
Microsoft wants people to use the web. :)
 
Hector said:
Ok, first, the microsoft.public.* newsgroups are not usenet.
Click to expand...

Gee, I wonder why Microsoft themselves refer to them as Usenet groups...

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/guide/newsgroupfaq.mspx
{snip]

Well, #1 once the MS servers goes down, Google will not be able to pull
from TK2MSFTNGP01.phx.gbl! It will have find some thing else.

#2, you won't have MS server to post, and if you found another, you
don't know if Google will be pulling from it or that your Serer will be
posting to GOOGLE.
Click to expand...

People post to the groups from all kinds of different servers, when the
Microsoft servers are down these other servers still synchronize between
themselves without any problem and these folks who post on other servers
can still post and read without the intermediary of Microsoft servers.
We have often seen this in the past when outages of a few hours or more
at the Microsoft servers have happened and some of us use other servers
to keep on posting, when the Microsoft servers come back only line they
then "catch-up" and then all the posts show up many hours latter on
these servers. This is obvious enough when you use non Microsoft
servers to read the posts in Microsoft groups, all kinds of posts which
have not made it to the MS servers, or posts which have been removed
from the MS servers are on the other servers for all to see and read.

John
 
Most probably you won't be able to move to anywhere else; not even
on forums because Microsoft hasn't got any plans to open forums
for Windows XP and earlier technology. Somebody suggested that
you can go to other P2P newsgroups like Google or aioe.org. This
again won't be possible because microsoft may force them to close
their newsgroups bearing Micro$hit name.

The only alternative I can think of is for somebody to organize a
group of about 10 individuals to come together and start their own
newsgroups to be financed by advertising and volunteers. I am
willing to put my name forward for this project provided there are
individuals who have some basic knowledge of hosting NNTPs which
can be expanded further as time goes by. I am good at programming
and developing websites using Java, Javascript and ASP and perhaps
some networking skills and SQL servers. that is all I know at
present.

hth


Pavel A. said:
Dear users of msnews.microsoft.com,

There are rumors that Microsoft plans to shut down this nntp server.

See this for example:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20004109-56.html

Any thoughts on where we can migrate from here - besides of the web-based
MSDN forums?.
To Google groups, maybe?

Regards,
-- pa
Click to expand...

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