wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) (06/24/89)
A couple of questions: Who administers the top-level domains in Europe? If they are maintained by EUnet/EUUG, do only EUUG members get to join those domains? Or, to be more succinct, if a company in Outer Boondocks, West Germany polls the US to get its own mail, will it be allowed to become company.de? Now that several European countries (including France, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland) are directly connected to the Internet, will NNTP help bring down the costs of getting news into Europe? w
jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid) (06/26/89)
In article <WISNER.89Jun23144304@anableps.berkeley.edu> wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) writes: >Who administers the top-level domains in Europe? Each European country has at least one site administering that country's domain. In some cases, there are two or more sites claiming authority for the same domain on different networks! > If they are maintained by >EUnet/EUUG, do only EUUG members get to join those domains? No. If the site is using UUCP on EUnet, it is supposed to be a member of the EUUG. The national backbone in each country maintains their own domain tables. They may also provide name mappings for other sites that are on different networks [eg X.400, Bitnet]. > Or, to be more >succinct, if a company in Outer Boondocks, West Germany polls the US to get >its own mail, will it be allowed to become company.de? No reason why not, provided the site is able to persuade a network authority to register their name. This might not be so easy as it sounds. If someone on that network has assumed responsibility for say the .de domain, your site might only be allowed to register through whoever is the authority for that domain. For the example you give, if the company wants to register as a UUCP site under the German domain, it would probably have to register through the German UUCP backbone. >Now that several European countries (including France, Denmark, The >Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland) are directly connected to the >Internet, will NNTP help bring down the costs of getting news into Europe? Not really. The major cost is the bit of wire that crosses the Atlantic and how it is used. This depends mainly on the charging policies of the various PTTs. The actual transport protocol used won't make much difference. In some cases, NNTP would be no help at all. For instance, the UK Academic community has free access to the Internet through a gateway in London. The gateway only provides telnet, ftp and mail service. It won't support NNTP or IP-level routing, so you can't get news that way even if you wanted to. Jim
dfk@cwi.nl (Daniel Karrenberg) (06/26/89)
In article <WISNER.89Jun23144304@anableps.berkeley.edu> wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) writes: >Who administers the top-level domains in Europe? If they are maintained by >EUnet/EUUG, do only EUUG members get to join those domains? In some countries the organisations running EUnet backbone host have indeed registered the Internet toplevel domain with SRI-NIC. They act as clearing houses according to the rules and will register subdomains of anyone who wants them according to the rules. EUUG or EUnet members get no preferential treatment whatsoever. This is more than can be said of some academic networks having registered the toplevel domains in other countries. Also EUnet has been very active in many countries to achieve coordination of email delivery using domain addresses. >Now that several European countries (including France, Denmark, The >Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland) are directly connected to the >Internet, will NNTP help bring down the costs of getting news into Europe? :-) :-) :-( :-( :-( Yes of course. Since every site connected to the Internet will set up an NNTP feed from some site in the US. The news will get over here very chaeply and with about 2 months delay because the links are so clogged. :-( :-( :-( :-( :-(. One of the two (soon three) transatlantic links providing the abovementioned Internet connectivity is maintained and financed by EUnet in cooperation with UUNET. It's paid out of sharing the cost for bringing news into Europe and by organisations actually paying for mail. This connectivity is not for free! Yes, having a leased line will bring down the cost *as long as everybody pays their share*. If cheating starts in a big way then the money will not be sufficent to keep (or upgrade) the line, the connectivity will go away and everybody looses. This is why there is agreement among the organisations providing Internet access in the abovementioned countries that sites receiving news via this infrastructure should pay their normal EUnet news subscription and use the hierarchical distribution scheme that minimises transmissions on expensive links. Daniel -- Daniel Karrenberg Future Net: <dfk@cwi.nl> CWI, Amsterdam Oldie Net: mcvax!dfk The Netherlands Because It's There Net: DFK@MCVAX
philip@axis.fr (Philip Peake) (06/26/89)
In article <WISNER.89Jun23144304@anableps.berkeley.edu>, wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) writes: > A couple of questions: > > Who administers the top-level domains in Europe? If they are maintained by > EUnet/EUUG, do only EUUG members get to join those domains? Or, to be more > succinct, if a company in Outer Boondocks, West Germany polls the US to get > its own mail, will it be allowed to become company.de? Only EUUG members may join EUnet. EUnet was set up by, and is run for the benefit of EUUG members. There are gateways into various domains. I think it improbable that a site not passing via one of the official gateways will be able to register in the (for example) .de domain. Certainly, mail to/from any site passing vi EUnet will only pass if that site is willing to pay for its transport costs. (Can I ask France Telecom to set up a special transfered charge scheme, so that all of my telephone call charges are transfered to YOUR account ? PLEASE !!! ) > Now that several European countries (including France, Denmark, The > Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland) are directly connected to the > Internet, will NNTP help bring down the costs of getting news into Europe? Tell me how the telecoms system knows the difference between bits transfered via UUCP and those transfered by NNTP ? Philip
wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) (06/28/89)
In article <573@axis.fr> philip@axis.fr (Philip Peake) writes: >> Who administers the top-level domains in Europe? If they are maintained by >> EUnet/EUUG, do only EUUG members get to join those domains? Or, to be more >> succinct, if a company in Outer Boondocks, West Germany polls the US to get >> its own mail, will it be allowed to become company.de? >Only EUUG members may join EUnet. >EUnet was set up by, and is run for the benefit of EUUG members. My question said nothing about joining EUnet. I asked if sites that are NOT members of EUnet are allowed to enter the Internet domains that EUnet manages. I refer specifically to the top-level domains for European countries, such as .DE for Germany. If EUnet does not allow such sites to join such domains, it is evil, rude, and very wrong. You can call a non-EUnet site foobar.de without requiring mail for that site to pass through EUnet gateways! Many people do not seem to realize this. A trivial addition to the .de zone would allow it. This would not hurt EUnet at all (in fact, it would bolster their image) and it would definitely help make international mail just a little bit easier. >Tell me how the telecoms system knows the difference between bits transfered >via UUCP and those transfered by NNTP ? NNTP is a protocol used to transfer USENET over Internet links. I can't be sure but it seems likely to me that the transatlantic Internet lines are leased, which means that there is a fixed cost to maintain it, not a per- packet fee. If those lines have a fixed cost, it won't cost any more money to send USENET articles down the pipe. Please, no bitching from the UK contingent; I know quite well why NNTP to JANET won't work. And incidentally, I do agree with the European who opined that care must be taken to avoid clogging those transatlantic wires with USENET traffic. w
ulmo@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Brad Allen) (06/29/89)
In article <573@axis.fr> philip@axis.fr (Philip Peake) writes: > > Internet, will NNTP help bring down the costs of getting news into Europe? > Tell me how the telecoms system knows the difference between bits transfered > via UUCP and those transfered by NNTP ? Ahh, this answers my same question too! In North America, the Internet connections have almost always been dedicated links, often satellites, often terrestial leased lines. I guess the diversity of carriers in USA makes things significantly easier. Right now most Internet traffic goes over the NSFNET, which to my surprise is a whole bunch of dynamically linked T1's via MCI communications! I would have never thought that MCI, a phone company, would be involved with this. After 20 years of ARPAnet connections, I think we just forget or don't realize that for whomever pays the bills, many of them down the line are paid to various phone companies and such: the links have always been there (for longer than I've been alive anyway), and certainly they are not going to disappear overnight. For us, Internet use is free ... I think someone, yeah, well, the taxpayers, which logically is me and a whole bunch of other people -- they pay for it ... I don't! Well, not directly. Hey, what's wrong with all you European countries, that you don't have humungus deficits of a coupla terrabucks, so you can do this networking stuff for free? God are you technologically behind!!! (Yesterday I called BARRNET, he said $12000/yr corp, $4000/yr nonprofit; $20000@56kbit or $26500@T1 install. He estimated for me that paying to the phone company for a line would be something like $500-600/month for me. Gee! Money's involved! I hadn't thought of that.)
philip@axis.fr (Philip Peake) (06/29/89)
In article <29859@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) writes: > In article <573@axis.fr> philip@axis.fr (Philip Peake) writes: > >> Who administers the top-level domains in Europe? If they are maintained by > >> EUnet/EUUG, do only EUUG members get to join those domains? Or, to be more > >> succinct, if a company in Outer Boondocks, West Germany polls the US to get > >> its own mail, will it be allowed to become company.de? > > >Only EUUG members may join EUnet. > >EUnet was set up by, and is run for the benefit of EUUG members. > > My question said nothing about joining EUnet. I asked if sites that are NOT > members of EUnet are allowed to enter the Internet domains that EUnet manages. > I refer specifically to the top-level domains for European countries, such as > .DE for Germany. > > If EUnet does not allow such sites to join such domains, it is evil, rude, > and very wrong. In Europe, there are normally several organisations managing any given domain (EUnet, BITNET, X400, etc). Depending upon the country there is reasonable co-ordination between the people involved - there are agreements to transport each others mail for instance, and to 'gateway' mail destined for a site on another network automatically and free of charge. So, you can register with EUnet, BITNET etc - I don't think that any of these will accept handling your mail free of charge. You can start your own network - then negociate with all of the people already handling managing that domain - providing you pay your own way they will probably agree to route mail to/from you - but you must do likewise. You must also do it professionaly - in USENET you send mail with a hope that one day it might reach its destination - always provided that some site doesn't use its god given right to re-route your mail, to change its headers, to use out of date maps etc - we have none of that in EUnet - the backbone structure is tight, the maps are *at most* hours old, and misrouted or lost mail are considered serious So, if you want to form your own network, and map it into .XX, you too will have to provide a service which the other member networks accept as being of acceptable quality - you will have MUCH more problems with other organisations over this than you will ever have with EUnet. Of course, if you just set up your machine on your own, and call it 'thingy.de' then no-one can or will stop you - but they are under no obligation to pass mail to/from you, or even to put your machine in their maps - this is something you do by negociation. > You can call a non-EUnet site foobar.de without requiring mail for that site > to pass through EUnet gateways! Many people do not seem to realize this. > A trivial addition to the .de zone would allow it. This would not hurt EUnet > at all (in fact, it would bolster their image) and it would definitely help > make international mail just a little bit easier. I think that you are confusing the way things are done in the USA, and the way that are done in Europe ... > >Tell me how the telecoms system knows the difference between bits transfered > >via UUCP and those transfered by NNTP ? > > NNTP is a protocol used to transfer USENET over Internet links. I can't be > sure but it seems likely to me that the transatlantic Internet lines are > leased, which means that there is a fixed cost to maintain it, not a per- > packet fee. If those lines have a fixed cost, it won't cost any more money > to send USENET articles down the pipe. Internet links (NSFnet and company) have quite severe restrictions placed upon them - they are for ACCADEMIC/RESEARCH use. They are NOT there to reduce the costs of people transfering news - especially if it is going to commercial sites. The USA <-> Europe link is already (and has been for quite some time) a leased line - and I *think* that NNTP is already used to transfer news between cwi and uunet. Remember that we use a leased line because, given the volume of trafic it is cheaper than any other means - no-one is going to be able to compete with a trailblazer - well, *just* maybe they can for News, but that is only part of the EUnet services. I have seen people claim incremental costs of ZERO - this is, of course, NEVER true - you can claim that adding one more site in europe has no cost because we have a leased-line. Ok, you can say this several times, and then, suddenly, you find that you have no capacity left on your leased line, you have to exchange your 64K line for a 128K line - you find that you need to add another 1000Mb of disk, you run out of CPU cycles - so do you say it is free for everyone, untill this happens, then the next one that joins gives you an incremental cost of half a million dollars - you try asking that person for that !!! > Please, no bitching from the UK contingent; I know quite well why NNTP > to JANET won't work. And incidentally, I do agree with the European who > opined that care must be taken to avoid clogging those transatlantic wires > with USENET traffic. Like the (in)famous news articles offering cars for sale in NJ etc ? I notice all of these come from AT&T employees - and I suppose AT&T gets LOTS of money from transporting these articles around the world .... As far as JANET is concerned, can you do ANYTHING with JANET which works ? :-) Philip
fr@icdi10.UUCP (Fred Rump from home) (07/03/89)
In article <4793@freja.diku.dk> keld@freja.diku.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen) writes: >People want a reliable service, and thus Eunet has evolved >to become more professional, as many of the backbones have >hired staff and their own machines dedicated to EUnet services. I don't think anybody is criticizing your backbone staffs or your professionalism. Or that somebody somewhere has to pay for their time. I believe the bone of contention is that the costs are so high that you'll never get the little guy involved. This, in turn, keeps your costs high because you can't share the cost with more sites. >Of cause you may be able to do things cheaper if you run >everything voluntarily and have free machines to your disposal, >but for how long will it last ? Remember decvax, ucbvax, seismo >and inhp4 ? The net has grown up and it is to big to run on >an voluntary basis, at least in Europe. >Danish IP/UUCP backbone Let me ask you how many sites you feed in Denmark? How many full news feeds, how many mail customers? Oh, you'll say you only have a small country, right? Ok, what's the population then? I have a little old 386 here with a 338MB disk. I feed about 10 sites locally. I have access to a full feed from 3 sites. I pay my own phone bill across the river (another state and higher charges). My main feed gets its feed from uunet mainly because they don't wish to impose on others (bpa or Bell of Pennsylvania and several other local sites). So, to be fair, as you would say, it costs about $250 (including phone delivery charges) to receive a good size feed from uunet. If everybody were to just take then bpa would shut its doors to like the sites you mentioned. My company has almost 200 customer clients receiving a selected news feed (end user type stuff) and E-mail all over the USA. We add about one a week. Most of these sites aren't even on the map as we serve as our own internal hub. We are but a small company. But there are thousands of us. This mostly possible because our telephone system discounts its charges dramatically after 11PM. So all this stuff goes on mostly at night. It costs only 20 or 30 cents to call 3000 miles across the country. How can all this be possible? It is called economies of scale. The more people that use a service that has a certain fixed cost anyway, the cheaper it gets for everyone. That is, unless you start making crazy rules about how this can't work! What few of us here see in Europe is a willingness to try something different. You seem so ademant about your professionalism and 'proper' procedures that the whole process of more information interchange seems to have gotten stuck with only a handful of users sharing inordinate costs. It seems that they like it that way just to keep the riff-raff out. Fred Rump -- This is my house. My castle will get started right after I finish with news. 26 Warren St. uucp: ...{bpa dsinc uunet}!cdin-1!icdi10!fr Beverly, NJ 08010 domain: fred@cdin-1.uu.net or icdi10!fr@cdin-1.uu.net 609-386-6846 "Freude... Alle Menschen werden Brueder..." - Schiller
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (07/03/89)
In article <575@axis.fr>, philip@axis.fr (Philip Peake) writes: > I have seen people claim incremental costs of ZERO - this is, of course, > NEVER true - Not for mail, no, but certainly for news feeds it is if everone pays the connect charges for their own feed. And if people feed and cross-feed each other. I understand you discourage sub- and cross- feeds. -- Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Business: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. | "X3J11 is not in the business Personal: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com. | of legislating morality ..." Quote: Have you hugged your wolf today? `-_-' | -- Henry Spencer