Colocation for RFN sponsored by ipHouse.

AND

Bandwidth, gear, and coding provided by Octanews. Help us help you.

This does not affect news.readfreenews.net (or allnews).

You have 2 options for donations, send snail mail to:
Readfreenews Donations
C/O Octanews
331 2nd Ave S
Suite 540
Minneapolis, MN 55401

Donations need to be cash, or checks/money orders made out to me personally, Mike Horwath.

Or via Paypal by clicking the the following button:

Money sent in via donation will be used solely to support the hardware/software for the RFN project.

As each donation comes in, a donations page will be updated. By default, individuals names will not be revealed unless the user specifically states that they would like their name on the donations page.

UPDATE! The new server is online and taking 'customers' right now, but as not enough money came in, I took some old hardware, RAID controller, and built a gnarly frankenserver using 6x36GB SCSI disks and an old PIII server board. This server is now news.readfreenews.net.

A new server will cost from US$3000.00 to a high of ~US$4700.00.
OR
I scalp a ton of old hardware and just make it work. This option was chosen for now though, unfortunately, there have been multiple disk failures over the last few months because of this old hardware. New drives have been ordered to replace the failed drives and the new'ish server should be back online soon.

The donation webpage is here!

RFN is Read Free News - a test network created to test hardware and software. Thousands of different users use these systems every day.

There are 3 different parts to RFN, the details are below.

RFN is based on Diablo for use as the backend spoolers, frontend readers, and peering servers.

Click here to see a logical network diagram of the RFN network.

news.readfreenews.net is a text only server that accepts and displays all articles in all groups carried but does not carry any of the actual binary articles posted to any of the groups listed. The server does accept and operate on cancels and supercedes.

Retention: 160 days or so (new server online)

To sign up for posting access, head on over to http://cust.readfreenews.net/ and sign up.

allnews.readfreenews.net is a text only server that accepts and displays all articles in all groups carried but does not carry any of the actual binary articles posted to any of the groups listed. The server does not accept and operate on cancels and supercedes.

Retention: 30 days or so (this server will never be upgraded)

biggulp.readfreenews.net is a text and binaries server that accepts and displays all articles in all groups carried. The server does not receive cancel or supercede messages.

Retention: 3 days or so

biggulp.readfreenews.net FAQ available here.

More when I can find time.

--
(c) 2003 and beyond by Uncle Dad Productions and his minions
Uncle Dad is Mike Horwath
Production is, well, Mike Horwath
A Dude