henry (10/06/82)
Since Armando still is not answering his mail, I'm going to try phoning him tomorrow. If I can't get this mess on its way to being cleared up in the next couple of days, an alternative news feed may be in order. While there is something to be said for connecting to a reasonably "central" site, there is also something to be said for connecting to a site which isn't quite so heavily loaded and which has system people who answer their mail in emergencies. Does anybody have any suggestions for feed sites other than Case Western (cwruecmp)? cwruecmp is (a) willing to be polled, (b) closer than decvax, (c) equipped with triple modems [decvax has 212 only], (d) not heavily loaded with uucp traffic, (e) willing to call us in emergencies [e.g. autodialer trouble], and (f) staffed by people who seem to believe in answering their mail. (If I seem to be harping on that last, I have good reason...) A site which was willing to call us on a regular basis would be better, but I'd be surprised to find one. (Oh, yes, cwruecmp is also (g) only one more hop away from the major network nodes.)
henry (10/13/82)
I have reluctantly sent the following to Armando: ----- To: decvax!aps hcr!decvax!aps watmath!decvax!aps Subject: please suspend news feed Our autodialing modem is out for repairs, and manual dialing is just not going to be able to keep up with the load. We're also finding connections to you rather difficult to maintain even with a different modem -- the mean time to failure seems to be very short. Accordingly, please suspend news feed to us until further notice. That's better than having things get plugged up and needing to clear everything out. Manual dialing should suffice to clean out the backlog and pick up mail. I'll let you know when our autodialer is back and you can start the feed again. Have you started calling us? -----