henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/16/86)
Some of you may have already noticed that a lot of the articles in the
technical newsgroups are showing up as having come via ...seismo!mnetor...
rather than the normal US->Toronto feeds ...clyde!watmath!utzoo... and
...linus!utzoo... Seismo is now feeding all of the technical groups,
and a few others, to mnetor via X.25. This is both faster and cheaper
than our phone links to linus and watmath. The watmath feed will stay,
for the moment, for redundancy and for the non-technical groups. The
linus feed is being decommissioned as unnecessary, which should ease
the burden of phone bills at both utzoo and linus.
This does have one negative consequence: we no longer have redundant
feeds for most of the non-technical groups. They will come via watmath
only. I can't justify the cost of keeping a phone feed alive just for
the non-technical groups. This isn't going to have a drastic effect,
since the only articles we'd miss would be ones that somehow got lost
on their way via watmath.
In the slightly longer term, the Waterloo-Toronto news feed will probably
change from watmath!utzoo by phone to watmath!mnetor by Datapac. If and
when this takes place, utzoo will remain a major local distribution hub
but will cease to be part of the long-haul Usenet backbone.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry