[news.config] changes at mirror.tmc.com

rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) (01/12/88)

Disclaimer:  I left Mirror for political reasons, but still like most of
the individuals there.  I'm not trying to embarrass anyone, but I think
the information in Brian's note is interesting and needs wider distribution.
Mirror's newsfeeds are a little strange and scattered throughout the US
(a hold-over from when I and mod.sources was there, and everyone wanted to
talk to us/me :-), so I added news.config to the newsgroups line and put a
USA distribution on.

In ne.news (<224100005@prism>), brian@mirror.TMC.COM writes:
>[ He is leaving and Mirror will no longer be carrying some newsgroups, but
>  he don't know which ones. ]
>For this reason, I am encouraging the sites that we feed { datacube, ishmael,
>rayssd, otto, ileaf, hpwala, beldar...} to find other sites to receive their
>info from since I cannot assure any level of reliability after my departure.

The long-distance sites will probably want to just drop mirror.  They are
all News-only, so they should be able to pick up from somewhere else
without too many problems.  I don't think Mirror is the primary feed for
anyone calling from out-of-state.  Those sites might also want to
consider Stargate or UUNET, for example.

There are two sets of downstream Boston-area sites:  News sites, and notes
sites.  One of them who wants to still get a full feed (including talk,
alt, and inet, I believe) should contact Brian and arrange to take over
the services mirror now provides.  It should be a notes site willing to
act as a news/notes gateway.  If one of the news sites does it, then the
notes folks will lose out.

The changes can of course be made without contacting Brian or anyone at
Mirror:  just find out who their primary feed is and yank the rug
out.  That's very anti-social, however, and I don't recommend it.

Reading between the lines, I would not be surprised to see both the
".TMC.COM" and ".ZONE1.COM" domains no longer be supported/maintained
within a couple of months.  It'll be interesting to see what happens, tho,
as I expect there's no real way to decommission a domain yet.  Out of
fairness, I should point out that Brian's note says he expects mail
service to remain unchanged.

All this just goes to reinforce how dependent Usenet is on dedicated
individuals and sites with bucks and cycles to spend.

PS:  If any of the affected parties wants a hand setting something up,
drop me a line; you might have to prove that you don't do drug tests and/or
slip me a few bucks and/or buy me dinner. :-)
	/r$
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