henry (10/06/82)
Decvax once again has so much traffic piled up for us that there is no way to get it through. Cranking up the patience of uucp is good only so far, alas: decvax's uucp seems to break in an obscure way when there's too much piled up, and that threshold has in fact been reached. Some tests with ultra-high patience settings resulted in consistent, reproducible failures on the other end. Our calls to decvax now succeed two or three times a night. It is arguable whether this is really enough to keep up with the traffic, even if the current backlog were cleared. Some other bits of evidence indicate that there definitely is something marginal in our modem's 212 circuits. I am going to check on the mechanics of getting it repaired, but this may take time. No luck so far in finding another such modem locally that we can borrow. In the long run, if the decvax link is going to continue giving such headaches, something must be done. One possibility is news feed via another site. The folks at Case Western (cwruecmp) are agreeable to us connecting to them for news. (Tentatively speaking, we would still connect to decvax for mail.) It's unlikely that we would be able to get them to swap calls with us the way we were figuring on earlier, but on the other hand they're quite a bit closer than decvax is, and the phone bills should be lower. The merits of call-swapping are substantial, but I have been totally unsuccessful in getting Armando to live up to his agreement to start call swapping. I'm still trying, but I'm fed up with sending message after message to him and getting no response. The disadvantage of feed via cwruecmp is that we are one hop further away from everything. I don't see this as serious for news, but not everybody will agree with this. Comments?
jensen@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Michael Jensen) (07/22/88)
Inter/Access, a non-profit organisation for artists' access to electronic and computer media (formerly Toronto Community Videotex) is looking for a 1200 baud newsfeed from the Toronto area. If you know of anyone who might be able to help out, please e-mail to ...mnetor!intacc!mann. Thanks...