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Indiana University Usenet Server
The Usenet news server at Indiana University was in existence for over decade if not two. During that time it was a focal point for information exchange and discussion for students and people in Bloomington and beyond. Groups like iu.classifieds and iu.gripe were quite popular throughout their history and had thousands of readers and posters. This server served as one of the first electronic mediums for people in Bloomington to have discusssions.
The server was retired in August of 2006 and replaced with shared mail folders. Below is an official reply to a message sent to the Office of the Vice President of Information Technology at IU asking for justification for the usenet server being taken down:
We spend around $70,000 per year to support Usenet. While this is not a large amount of money for IU, in light of eight local groups that are using it the cost/group is quite high. To put things in perspective, $70,000 is about the same amount of money we spend on Listserv and would probably be sufficient to provide an IM service for IU.
Feelings and discussion on this topic took place in iu.gripe.
Mark Krenz at Suso Technology Services re-setup usenet.suso.org as a usenet server and started carrying many of the popular iu.* newsgroups as of June 20th, 2006. Only the more popular groups where transfered over and some groups where combined together. There has been some interest in this and a handful of users migrated over. Eventually Mark shut down his usenet server on June 9th, 2009. It hadn't been touched for the previous two years.
The usenet server process was finally turned off at 9:50am EST on August 3rd as it was no longer accessable on tcp port 119 (at least from Kiva Networking's netblock). The host can still be pinged though so the physical server is perhaps still running.
Access
The IU newsgroup server was only available if you are on IU's network, but also was available if you are on Kiva Networking's network. This special arrangement between IU and Kiva was made in 2000 at the request of Chris Dent.
Groups
List of IU specific groups
This list of usenet groups is current as of May 1st, 2006 and contains 473 groups that were specifically created for use at IU. There are some groups that once existed but where removed at the request of those that sponsored them. If anyone has a more complete list, please add them to this page. The retention period on articles in these groups was about 3 months.
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Big 8
On top of IU's own newsgroups, the news server carried a full feed of the "big 8" categories of newsgroups, this includes alt.*, rec.*, soc.* and so on.
