Configuration for a news server

[Chris Picton]

Hi

I have just been given the task of rebuilding my company's news server.
Knowing nothing about news, I thought that I should get some advice from
'people in the know' so to speak.

I would like to keep binaries for a week, text for longer (what is a
reasonable time)

What I would like to know:
1)	Disk space requirements.
	What would be nice is something like:
		for binaries you need x Gb per day you want to keep them
		for text, you need y Gb per day they are being kept

2)	Other hardware
		what types of disk (80Mb/sec scsi/number of controller
cards/etc)
		cpu requirements
		memory requirements

3)	Speed of link to the server.
		What sustained transfer rate will I need to the news server
from my upstream?

4)	OS?
		I will be using FreeBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.  Are there
any other suggestions.  Which out of BSD or linux would you use.

5)	Scalability.
		If I need 100Gb disk space now, how much will I need in a
year's time.  How fast does usenet grow?

6)
	Anything else you think is worthwhile knowing

Thanks in advance

--
Chris Picton
Usko Communications Systems Developer
Chris.Picton at usko.com