bill@carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (06/16/88)
Before I get into David's article, I had composed an email reply. The farther I got into the reply the more I felt it _should_ be posted because there are a lot of sites like his and mine, little teapot leaves who would like to be producers as well as consumers. We can bring some things to the party, so I'm following up rather than replying. In article <329@bdt.UUCP> david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) writes: > >Being the admin of a simple leaf of a leaf of a leaf site, I >usually don't participate in these conversations, but I couldn't >resist this time. I'm taking a lot of license deleting a lot of what he said in order to supplement his article, not ignore it. > It's clear that anything you say in this group >is going to get flamed, so I'm not even going to put in one of those >"please don't flame me..." lines. Isn't it a shame he's correct? Asbestos suit on and zipped, let's go. >There's been a lot of talk about freeloaders. And at this time, I feel >I'm a freeloader, but not by design. I run a little 286 UNIX box There are a bundle of us just like you. I am awed by a decwrl (I got to actually walk its halls one day) and clearly we can't offer the class or category of service as the big boys, but we're there. Maybe we even do deserve some of the heat we get from time to time because our sheer numbers have inflated at least the maps. >hops from a backbone. Our machine is taxed to just chew on the news >we get, but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to feed others or do >my part forwarding mail. But it doesn't work that way. Nobody wants >a partial feed, at 2400bps, from a tiny leaf site. And who wants to >route mail through that type of node either? Everybody wants a full >feed at 9600 bps directly from the nearest backbone site. That's not exactly my experience, proposal to follow, but what David says is essentially correct. It's easy to feel like a second class citizen when article after article suggests that the micros should carry a bell and a bowl. I won't propose the "revenge of the teapots" :-), but rather something useful or at least a challenge to the "big boys". I feed a couple of sites at 2400bps and with a subset of my partial feed. I feed one site at 1200bps and it's a 3B2! Let's accept David's point but turn it around. How does a 1200bps site get a feed at all any more? How does a teapot who only wants or can handle a partial feed get a feed? My site is blessed by having a long suffering upstream SA who _will_ put up with a teapot leaf. I propose that the hotter sites let the teapots handle the applications that they just can't fit in. A brief example. The San Antonio, TX "backbone" (not really, but he is to us) is petro. They handle news and mail for the entire area, about a fifty mile radius. The SA jumps through hoops to keep everyone happy and spends a lot of time, grief, and money to do it. They (petro) just can't handle any more "readers", it's a matter of cycles and modems. Enter the teapots. We can handle that, we have a few cycles to contribute and our "MR" light will burn out long before our "OH" light. I invite, even challenge, the net to figure out a way to fit us in and put us to work. It seems like an appropriate time. >What I'm trying to say (rather poorly I suppose), is that, is it >possbile for smaller sites (like mine) to relieve any of the burden >from the medium sized and larger sites? I can't claim I said it any better but I used a lot more words :-) >a crumby little 286 is not going to do much, but I'm willing to >do my best with what I have. I have a small company (read myself and >my wife part-time) but I don't want to be a freeloader becuase I >find USENET valuable and I don't want to contribute to its death >if I can help it. Me too, and I'd be shocked if the others just like us felt any differently. At this point the other teapots should flame away, I just volunteered _your_ machine, in _your_ house, to become part of the solution. >It seems like if the load can be better distributed, there are >resources out there to handle it. Precisely. I have, can, do, and will continue to help new folks/sites onto the net. No noble motives, I have more spare time than an SA who is tangling with the latest burst of six month old stuff from his neighbor. Further, where does some poor soul get access any more? Let's not scream "no more access, there's too much already", there isn't. The people who read news at ssbn (other than me) almost never post anything. The few times they do, it's almost always (excepting me) a good contribution. [ I replied to what he concludes with ... ] >more of their resources, within their budgets. I know there >are no controlling bodies, but what if we polled for information >from site admins regarding what resources they are willing to expend >(e.g. how many long distance feeds, or mail routing links). In my opinion David is referring to some TLC. The teapots can provide a service that the workhorses can't. We can acquire, service, and "grow" new netters. We can provide links to the hinterlands (ssbn is in Pipe Creek, Texas). We can pick up people that the others can't fiddle with and fiddle with them. We can teach netiquette (sp?). >freeloading without "official" control, but I still believe that >there are a lot of "unintentional" freeloaders like me out there >that may be able to help the problem. David's right. We're here, we're willing, we won't just dissolve, give us something to do, we'll do it (leave your bowls and bells at the door :-). Will someone propose comp.teapot? :-) :-) :-) Seriously, I think that the net should take a close look at the smaller, less featured sites and see if there isn't something that we can do to alleviate the overall (perceived) problem. There is another facet that should actually make us be an attractive resource. At a teapot site the SA is owner, manager, accountant, programmer, trouble shooter, and janitor. There are no layers or bureaucracy to deal with, the entire cast of characters is at the end of the wire. We can be more agile and more responsive than our larger neighbors. I don't want to hear any more groaning (other than for the length of this follow up) about the micros until you bigger folks exploit the resource that is already in place. Micros flame by email please :-) -- Bill Kennedy Internet: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM Usenet: { killer | att-cb | ihnp4!tness7 }!ssbn!bill
blair@obdient.UUCP (Doug Blair) (06/18/88)
> >It seems like if the load can be better distributed, there are > >resources out there to handle it. > > Seriously, I think that the net should take a close look at the smaller, > less featured sites and see if there isn't something that we can do to > alleviate the overall (perceived) problem. To further the suggestions from David Beckemeyer at bdt and Bill Kennedy at carpet, here are some additional thoughts from a "small" site admin: obdient is an intermediate node in Wheaton Illinois. Our machine is between laidbak (Lachman Associates, who do LOTS of UNIX ports and rewrites for a living) and wheaton (Wheaton College, where LOTS of Students and a few Computer Professionals depend on our feed for news). The machine is a 386 clone box with microport's SYS V/386. We also exchange alt, pubnet, biz and local Chicago news with ddsw1 (a retail commercial site with some public access), chinet (one of public access's "old guard"), vpnet and otishq. There are perhaps a half dozen newsreaders including myself here, but hundreds of other newsreaders depend on our feeds. Those sites with which we exchange a full feed are local calls (which in Chicago cost about a nickel per dialup); the subset feeds are about 50 cents a day between the four of 'em. All our connections are at 2400 (your contributions to the Trailblazer fund appeciated :-). We're about 3 miles north of Bell Labs (er... AT&T labs) (Yes, "THE" labs) and this county is LOADED with AT&T employees who are dying to access Usenet outside of company channels lest something they say be interpreted as "official." We are going to continue to forward 3rd-site email, much of which will originate from AT&T sites. Why? Because I'm a nice guy, and I know that lots of other sites will be willing to forward my mail when it shows up on their system. Everyone has to do a little bit to give everyone else access to the rest of the planet, and amazingly it works. Now a couple days ago I saw postings that mentioned the number of paths that go through ihnp4 - very few were counted. These sites are obviously on the coast - because from here MORE THAN A THIRD of our paths pass through ihnp4 (could it be that we're only 10 miles away that has something to do with it :-) :-)?). So, to us, losing that site *IS* a big deal. I started thinking about the problems inherent in our present backbone oriented setup. With these thoughts in the background I submit that our site is typical of AT LEAST 25% of the sites on the net. (Go ahead, cd to your map directory and try: cat u.* | grep \#S | egrep Micro\|micro\| 286\|386\|PC\|AT\|XT\|Clone\|clone\|XENIX\|Xenix\|Microport | wc -l to get the aproximate number of micros in the maps). Given that the power of a 386 clone is equivalent to a mini-computer of five years ago it seems to me that the connectivity and resources of the "micro sites" on the net is roughly equivalent to the resources available to usenet in the first year or so of its existance. How did usenet operate in the first year? Slowly, awkwardly at first, with LOTS of mistakes. But it *DID* work and grow and evolve - rather nicely too, I think. And even if ALL the backbone sites were to drop out of service (which, please note, AT&T sites are *NOT* doing) usenet would continue to grow, albeit slowly and awkwardly as before. Hopefully with fewer mistakes :-). The point of the above paragraph is that USENET IS IN NO DANGER of dying at all - only in danger of perhaps losing readers with the misfortune to work companies which do not appreciate the value of the net. And I believe that the more worthwhile network contributors among these would seek out public access sites to read and post to usenet. Because they would then pay more of the cost, chances are the quality of the net would improve, there would be fewer flames, etc etc. Hopefully none of these contemplated usenet cutbacks will take place, but the discussion HAS brought about several worthwhile suggestions for usenet improvement. I don't wish to hash over the organization of newsgroups, their content or moderation in this posting - the present setup seems to work tolerably well if we could just forget JJ and comp.women and get back to work :-)! But there has been a proposal to SHIFT MORE NEWS READING TO SMALLER SITES which deserves thorough examination. A typical 386 site is grossly underutilized. Even with a full newsfeed coming in and going out every night (and to be honest precious little else happening here) I can't claim that more than 10% of our CPU resources are used every month. How many other small sites have a unix-pc in the basement office that could take the load off an intermediate site while the owner is away from home at work? My guess is hundreds! How many 386 sites, using PC Pursuit at 2400, would it take to aproximate the connectivity and *usenet-related* data traffic now afforded by two dozen backbone sites? Probably no more than 300! These small sites and the resources now exist, and it's high time that we make use of them. It *IS* unfair that the backbone sites absorb so much of the cost. It *IS* unfair that such a large amount of mainframe and large site CPU time be taken up with usenet if and when there is more productive work waiting to be done. For the long-term good of the net, it's time for the smaller intermediates (like obdient) and the tiny leaf nodes to ask their upsteam neighbors "Is there anyone I can feed for you?" and "Would some of your readers save toll charges if they called my machine instead?" Questions like these will hopefully result in a more even distribution of the net's resources and costs; the big guys have been paying a disproportionately large amount for too long. Got a 286 AT Clone in your office? What's it doing when you're not there? Why not let someone call it? And if the cost is a concern, something on the order of $50-$75 a year seems to pay for the cost of additional phone lines and modem capacity at most public access sites; $300 will pay for an offbrand 2400 modem and a bottom-of-the-line phone line. It may be argued that further decentralization of usenet distribution would increase propigation time. That's quite likely. But with the exception of some rather handy tips on how to fix the Daylight Saving Time date I can't think of a usenet posting that wouldn't have been just as useful had it arrived a few hours or even a few days later. After all, usenet isn't being used to fire missles or route organ transplants. Usenet is an information exchange (where we announce conferences a couple of years in advance :-)!). Now it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that all the smaller sites agressively try to help out their big brothers without doing so myself, so HOW ABOUT IT YOU GUYS IN DuPAGE? INDIAN HILLS? Chicago's Western 'Burbs? I've easily got room to feed a couple more sites with full newsfeeds and can probably support 10 more casual newsreaders before I need another couple of phone lines. If you're interested, please email (try it without ihnp4!) obdient!blair. Thanks for reading this far. Time for another Old Style. Doug ___ _ _ _ _ / \ | | | | |_| _| |_ Doug Blair_______312-653-5527 | | || |_ ___ _| | _ ___ __ |_ _| Obedient Software Corporation | | || ==\ / ==\ /== | | | / ==\ | \ | | 1007 Naperville Road_________ \___/ |___/ \___/ \___| |_| \___/ |_|_| |_| Wheaton, Illinois 60187______