[Pan-users] GigaNews warns "Usenet Growth Reveals Need for 64-bit Based Article Numbering"

[SciFi]

Hi,

Still mozying around here & there…
then I saw this posted at GigaNews website:

“Usenet Growth Reveals Need for 64–bit Based Article Numbering”

<http://www.giganews.com/news/article/64-bit-Usenet.html>

I am a GN customer, pan2 here is set to their U.S. farm as
“primary” and to their Europe farm as “fallback”.

Not intending this to be advertising for GN but they are planning
on adding more equipment to accommodate 240–days retention as
promised in September (a few weeks away).

This much retention along with massive numbers of articles in the
binary groups (esp huge hi–def video files) are causing them to
issue this warning:

“Giganews is advising all Usenet client and NNTP software
developers to adopt a 64–bit unsigned integer format for article
numbering.”

And so, for perhaps the first time in known history, we might be
hitting some hard limits here, earlier than IPv6 even.  GN says
“[t]he first newsgroup to exceed this limit is anticipated to do
so in about 200 days” — i.e. from the date of that webpage which
was 18–August–2008.

I bet this will also affect ‘NZB’ indexes: most are offering
similar retention periods, leading me to believe they are
glomming GN’s headers as well (some even admit so).

I wonder what is pan2’s status w/r/t this?
Shall I open a bug–report to track it (maybe already open)?
(heh, hope my sign–on info still works there)

Thanks.        :)