jfh@rpp386.UUCP (John F. Haugh II) (08/15/88)
In article <676@ontenv.UUCP> soley@ontenv.UUCP (Norman S. Soley) writes: > When killer went off the net a while ago there was a > flurry of activity when all these sites posted their > map entries with killer marked (DEAD) then when it > came back another round of postings. It would have > been much easier to post a "killer is dead please do a > -d killer on your next pathalias run" when killer went dead back in march or whenever, most of us were cut off from the rest of the world. almost everyone lost their news feed, and quite a few of us were without mail service. try to understand what it is like if all the sudden the best route down the street is by way of uunet or sun or some other backbone. mail which used to take 2 or 3 hours is now getting bounced off of a backbone machine in virginia or new jersey. as a result of the actions of david butler, allen gwinn, myself, and countless others, we managed to get dallas pretty well reorganized before killer even returned to the air. people as far south as houston were greatly affected. before it was all over, we had restored connectivity into austin, and i seem to recall even houston was a reasonable route. (greg hackney at southwestern bell is one of our big non-killer related supporters, thanks are due to greg) many of us are individuals, not companies, running netnews and mail off of our own systems. we have gotten to actually know each other as people, not some strange address, like jgd@pollux or tj@texsun. so, when someone flames john meaders or j. eric townsend or some other texan, I take personal offense, because i know that next time some major regional site goes down, i wouldn't want a friendlier and more helpful bunch of people to help glue it all back together. fortunately, because we now know each other much better, you should never have to worry about killer causing the grief it did. so, next time eric or john or myself posts one of those boring map updates, just remember how nice it is that all your mail through killer is coming back. and besides, they make me say all these nice things about them. if i don't, they tell everyone in the restuarant that i'm mark ethan smith when we go to lunch once a month ;-) -- John F. Haugh II +--------- Cute Chocolate Quote --------- HASA, "S" Division | "USENET should not be confused with UUCP: killer!rpp386!jfh | something that matters, like CHOCOLATE" DOMAIN: jfh@rpp386.uucp | -- apologizes to Dennis O'Connor
dan@maccs.McMaster.CA (Dan Trottier) (08/17/88)
I sometimes wonder how many sites actually take the map updates posted in
this newsgroup and actually go through the effort to patch them into the
map distribution. In any case it would seem that the present system doesn't
satisfy these needs. What is really needed is automated software for taking
these individual postings and merging them into the pathalias database.
People should agree on a format and newsgroup name (comp.mail.maps.hurry :-)
for these updates. Once that is done we could then modify the map unpacking
software and pathalias to handle this now manual task.
Much more productive than flaming each other I would think.
dan
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