News - Jul 2005

Jul 25 2005 - One of our mailin servers died this morning, and took a bit to restart. No mail was lost, but some mail destined for this machine would have been queued and delayed. This would only affect delivery of some incoming mail, and not the reading of mail at all.

Jul 12 2005 - We're going to turn off our netnews server in the near future, probably early fall. We're going to turn off our clarinet news feeds effective now, because our subscription just ran out.

We've run a Usenet/Netnews server for many years. But now we have Web-based newsreaders (such as Google Groups), as well as email, Blackboard for classes, and so on. The local UIC groups are hardly used any more (and none for classes). The usefulness of having our own news server has significantly diminished.

If you, or people you know, are among the small number of current users, we're sorry for the inconvenience. But use is way down and there are good Web alternatives for essentially all the news groups stored on our server. It only makes sense we put our money and effort into more useful services.