Gopher and news servers prepare for retirement
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Following years of declining usage, Computing Services plans to retire
the UMM gopher and news servers in summer 2001.
UMM's gopher server was an important source for online information in
the mid-'90s, acting as a campus-wide information system and a part of
the network of University of Minnesota gopher servers. The gopher
software (developed at the Twin Cities campus) was heavily used around
the world. By 1997, though, the vast majority of information and
material that had been formerly provided via gopher had moved to World
Wide Web servers and browsers.
At the present time, nobody has updated any information on the UMM
gopher server for about a year, and all gopher-based applications that
are known to us in Computing Services have been moved to the Web
server. The gopher server (no longer a real physical server, but only
a partition on the same machine as the UMM Web server) will be shut
down this July.
The UMM news server, sometimes called a Usenet server, is one means of
access to the Usenet newsgroups -- a network of tens of thousands of
topical discussion groups with names like alt.rock-n-roll.classic,
sci.bio.microbiology, and rec.collecting.stamps. Similar to electronic
mailing lists, but with messages delivered to a public server rather
than to a private mailbox, the newsgroups began to decline when they
were discovered by the advertisers/spammers. Usenet continues to be
popular among an ever-smaller group of users. There are now only about
twenty regular Usenet users at UMM.
The serious problem with running a news server locally on the UMM
campus is the huge amount of network bandwidth and server disk space
it requires. Since there are in excess of 10,000 Usenet newsgroups,
with some generating dozens of messages a day, the Usenet news "feed"
to the UMM campus requires regular transmission of large,
multi-megabyte files across UMM's Internet connection. Then those
files with their hundreds of messages are stored on a UMM server,
requiring a massive allocation of disk space and a regular schedule to
"expire" or remove older messages. With only a handful of UMM users
reading perhaps a few dozen newsgroups total, it is immediately
obvious that hundreds of megabytes a day of Internet traffic and disk
storage are being wasted on newsgroups and messages that nobody is
reading.
Closing the UMM news server does not mean that UMM users can no longer
read Usenet newsgroups! Access to newsgroups will be as simple as
changing your newsreader (Netscape Messenger for many users) to point
to news.tc.umn.edu instead of news.morris.umn.edu. There will be a
small amount of hassle the first time, as the news reader and the news
server will not be able to exchange information about the messages
that have already been read. After the first time, however, access
will be as simple as it always has been, and network traffic will be
confined only to the messages that people actually want to read.
Also, some classes (especially in the Science and Math Division) have
sometimes used local newsgroups to communicate in classes. Based on
observed usage, this doesn't seem to be common anymore. However, we
will continue to set up local newsgroups (such as umm.biol.class.1003)
for class use at the request of any faculty member, for at least the
next academic year.
If you have any questions, please contact me.
John Bowers
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POSTSCRIPT
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After years as the master gopher, the once great gopher.tc.umn.edu
seems to have gone to the great Gopherhole in the sky, and Gopher
seems no longer officially supported by the institution that
created it (University of Minnesota).
From the new generation of Gopher wranglers, we'd like to have a
moment of silence for the Gopher masters and the founders of
Gopherspace, as it was a nice ride while it lasted. Who knows where
this classic technology will lead tomorrow?
