tencati@JPL-VLSI.ARPA (09/29/86)
I have a purely academic question. Is anyone considering the fact that there
are many users on the ARPAnet that are not "official" users?
When I was in college a few years ago, an arpanet account was very hard to get.
Unless you were faculty, forget it (this was at USC).
It seems that now there are many more students and people who are not really
using the net for work, as much as an electronic post office. My host spends
90% of it's time on the ARPAnet sending and receiving INFO-THIS, and INFO-THAT.
Also, I have multiple users receiving the same message from INFO-WHATEVER
as separate TCP connections to my host. I think part of the congestion mess
is that hosts (like mine) do not utilize "central mailboxes" and do the
redistribution locally.
I do feel that the subscribership of the net, and the "official DARPA business"
rules that applied a few years ago have been very lax lately. Now, most
universities let their students onto the net, and most hosts with network
access do the same.
I'm not saying that this should be restricted because the ARPAnet is a useful
tool. Especially to system managers like myself. I just think that with the
increased volume of users and the proliferation of INFO lists, the mail traffic
has increased drastically over the past few years, and with the advent of
these new protocols (PC/IP for example), it is becoming easier and easier for
*anyone* to get connected up to the ARPAnet...
I'm not flaming, I just had an extra 2 cents in my pocket...
Ron Tencati
JPL-VLSI.ARPAmike@BRL.ARPA (Mike Muuss) (09/30/86)
The multiple recipients of mail argument is a bit hard to support, considering that SMTP allows (and most implementations implement) all recipient addresses to be presented first, followed by one copy of the body of the message. At most 4 IP datagrams are needed for each additional address (assuming no packet loss). -Mike
DCP@QUABBIN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (David C. Plummer) (09/30/86)
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 86 09:11:01 PDT
From: tencati@Jpl-VLSI.ARPA
I have a purely academic question. Is anyone considering the fact that there
are many users on the ARPAnet that are not "official" users?
My opinions:
The INFO-THIS, INFO-THAT problem is a site administration problem. Your
site allows your users to receive those lists. I'm not sure there are
programs to prevent people from getting added, but if somebody were
willing to watch the mail logs and "catch" the people, they could be
told to conform to site policy and get themselves removed from the
lists. One possible solution is to ask all maintainers of major mailing
lists to completely disallow individuals on the lists and require that
all "recipients" be local redistribution lists at the target sites.
This would allow site managers to restrict incoming mail volume by
disallowing their users to receive lists contrary to site policy.
(Sounds facsist, and it probably is. I don't know if I believe this,
but it is a possibility.)
The "multiple users receiving the same message on separate connections"
problem has two causes. The major cause is that the sending site
refuses to send the same message to multiple recipients. I believe this
was the case with previous Unix software; I don't know if it has ever
been fixed. A second possible cause is lack of local redistribution.
"Official DARPA business" made a lot more sense back in the NCP days.
With the advent of IP, it can be claimed that you aren't connected to
the ARPAnet, you are connected to the Internet. The ARPAnet is
logically and physically just a very small part of the entire Internet.
The real problem we are seeing is that it is the backbone of the
Internet. The solution is obvious (I'm assuming the proliferation of
machines will continually increase traffic): put more bandwidth into the
>>Internet<<. This could be by adding more ARPAnet capability, or
providing other (redundant) paths. Who pays for it isn't clear, nor is
the choice of technology.
I'm not flaming, I just had an extra 2 cents in my pocket...
The 2 cent token is moving around the net...mark@cbosgd.att.com (Mark Horton) (10/01/86)
>My host spends >90% of it's time on the ARPAnet sending and receiving INFO-THIS, and INFO-THAT. >Also, I have multiple users receiving the same message from INFO-WHATEVER >as separate TCP connections to my host. If the ARPANET mailing lists do turn out to be the cause of the problem, I'd like to suggest a possible solution: Netnews. Netnews was invented on the UUCP network, where we didn't have the seemingly "unlimited" bandwidth of the ARPANET. It had to survive on 1200 baud dialup lines with UUCP. Nonetheless, we still manage to push around about a megabyte/day of traffic over dialups. (This figure 1MB/day counts each message only once, not once per recipient.) It's been possible for UNIX sites on the ARPANET to exchange netnews via UUCP or SMTP Mail for years now. Even these primitive methods have many benefits (in our perception) over mailing lists: (1) Only one copy of each message is sent to each system (although we do sometimes have redundant links, sending redundant copies, for extra reliability, duplicates are weeded out using Message-ID so the users rarely see a duplicate.) (2) Error messages don't go to the sender, they automatically go to the person responsible for the link in question. (3) Users see their "news" separately from their "mail" (unless they want their news mailed to them, which is also possible but inefficient) which means that mail will have higher priority than news for most users. (By "news" I mean what's considered "mass mailing" on the ARPANET.) (4) Users get other benefits, such as grouping of subjects and discussions, and never have to go through a moderator or list maintainer to start reading or posting to a newsgroup. (5) Only one copy is kept on each machine's disk, rather than one copy in each user's mailbox. (6) News is automatically expired after two weeks (or whatever it's locally configured to) so the disk usage is fairly constant; still, users can join into the middle of a discussion and immediately have two weeks worth of "back issues". (7) Cross-posting allows a discussion to go on in multiple forums (e.g. header-people and namedroppers) while sending only one copy of each message around, and each user sees each message only once. (8) By batching news, there is less transport overhead. Each hour, a host may accumulate all new news and send it to its neighbors. (9) All news goes through the same pipe, so it's easy to gather statistics about traffic volume, both total and per-group. We have also recently found a way to measure readership. Even better methods are evolving. NNTP allows transfer of netnews efficiently over TCP, and allows one machine to serve as a remote disk so you don't need a copy of netnews on every machine. Stargate will allow you to get moderated news from any cable TV service that carries WTBS, or any satellite dish that can get WTBS. The major problems with using netnews on the ARPA Internet have historically been (1) The implementations run under UNIX, and nobody has written one for TOPS 20. (But I've heard rumors of an NNTP compatible TOPS 20 implementation under development.) (2) Many users prefer to keep their mail and news lumped together in their mailbox. (I can't understand this, but I guess it's a religious issue, like which editor you use.) We have several user interfaces for netnews, optimized to reading large volumes of traffic, and encouraging good manners among the posters. Usenet is the network currently carrying netnews, and includes large chunks of UUCP as well as many ARPA Internet Usenet hosts. (If the host runs UNIX and is a major Internet host, chances are good it's on Usenet, although representation is light at some of the senior ARPANET universities like MIT, CMU, and Stanford.) Some fraction of the ARPA mailing lists are gatewayed into Usenet newsgroups, including the TCP-IP list (I'm posting this as a Usenet message, and it will be transparently be sent to the moderator.) Usenet is a network, netnews is a technology. If mailing lists are congesting the ARPANET, it may be possible to use the netnews technology to carry the same amount of traffic at far less cost to the network, simultaneously making the mailing lists more widely available and cutting down on the workload of mailing list maintainers. (Most unmoderated Usenet newsgroups don't have anyone "in charge" of them, they run themselves.) Let's see where the load is really coming from; if mailing lists turn out to be the culprit, I offer netnews as an alternative to cutting back. Mark