My ISP recently stopped carrying newsgroups so I’m wondering if I could set up my own news server with just the groups that I want. Can this be done?
You would have to find an upstream site willing to send you the newsgroups. This may cost you money and will certainly cost you byte quota. If you are the only person wanting a couple of newsgroups you might to subscribe to a paid newsfeed or browse over a web interface.
If you have found a news-group that you can NOT access via Google-groups,
then you at least have a rational reason to WANT to run newgroup software.
(IMO)
Thanks for the info. <sigh> That’s what I was afraid of. I suppose Giganews is gonna get my cash. They have a 200 day retention on the binary groups (which beats the 30 days I was used to) and a 99% completion rate (which par files can very easily fix). As for a web interface for the usenet? <choke> <gag> <vomit> What? Do I look like a noob windows user on an aol account? 
Gimme knode or klibido and nzb files any day.
Many usenet users ignore posts from Google-groups. Quite a while back I tried posting an inquiry to alt.os.suse from Google and got no reply. Posted the same inquiry from knode and got a reply within hours. I’ve also seen this happen many times to others.
That’s rational one.
Last I checked, Google didn’t carry binary groups.
That’s rational two. Which almost, but not quite, supersedes rational number one.