battan@tc.fluke.COM (Jim Battan) (03/17/88)
I promised a summary of responses I received about UUNET availability. Here it is. First, my question: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Fluke would like to put our newly-acquired TrailBlazers to good use by >hooking them up to UUNET for UUCP and News transfer. However, a few >months ago we saw some articles posted in various newsgroups about the >clogged lines and unreliable feeds they were getting from UUNET, particularly >during the night and through Tymnet. > >What is your current opinion about UUNET access and reliability? >Is the access better through the 800 or local number? >(Does Tymnet charge a per-packet or similar tariff?) >Is it possible to get a full news feed during the midnight-8AM times? > >Mail me your opinions and comments; I'll post a summary (I promise) if I >get enough responses. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've cross-posted this response to comp.mail.uucp since it may be of interest to those types of readers too. Here are the responses (I put a few comments at the end): ===== cut here, if you must ====== From uw-beaver!ames!ll-xn!ames!lll-lcc!lll-winken!uunet!vsi!friedl Fri Mar 4 08:18:50 1988 We have been on UUNET for a month or so and do our work through Tymnet or the 800 service (no 'Blazers yet...). The machine calls a couple of times in the evening when I send mail and we have had very high availability. We are quite happy with the service. ============================================================================ From sun!pyramid!zorch!scott Fri Mar 4 09:46:04 1988 At the moment, everything is hunky-dory. I access uunet at 1200 through Tymnet. There were some *serious* problems in November and December that related to Tymnet throughput going up much faster than Rick Adams had anticipated and the 19.2Kbps lines from Tymnet were saturated. I have also heard that there were some addditional problems with Sequent's X.25 support. I also had some access problems about 2-3 weeks ago; the Tymnet link wasn't working even though I could dial the 800 number and see that the system was still up. >Is the access better through the 800 or local number? Looked about the same; unfortunately, my 1200 baud modem and uunet's TBs on those lines don't sync up completely and so I can't use those lines. >(Does Tymnet charge a per-packet or similar tariff?) Uunet access through Tymnet costs $4/hr, off-peak hours. That fee seems to cover both the uunet part and the Tymnet part. ============================================================================ From dsc@seismo.CSS.GOV Fri Mar 4 16:49:28 1988 being one of the volunteers for uunet, i'm not an unbiased source of information :-) but i should mention that you are not charged by the packet for the tymnet lines. instead you are charged by time according to the following rates Charge per Tymnet Connect Hour Density Prime Time Non-Prime Time High $25.00 $4.00 Medium $28.00 $4.00 Low $32.00 $4.00 Charge per Direct Connect Hour Type Daytime Evening Night Incoming 800 $16.00 $12.00 $10.00 Outgoing WATS $17.00 $12.00 $ 8.00 Incoming Local $ 1.50 $ 1.50 $ 1.50 Outgoing Local $ 3.00 $ 3.00 $ 3.00 also, our tymnet connection has been increased from a 19.2k line to 56k and we now have seven normal (local or long distance) phone lines and six 800 numbers. all the modems are trailblazers. ============================================================================ From rick@seismo.CSS.GOV Fri Mar 4 16:49:45 1988 Well, I'll give you some biased information.... Today we added 6 additional 800 numbers (total of 8) and 2 additional "local" numbers (total of 8). Last month we upgraded the Tymnet connection to 56kbps and thats helped a lot. There is no packet charge applied anywhere. Everything is by connect hour. You get one bill from uunet no matter what you do. (i.e. tymnet bills us and we bill you). So, the issue of tymnet charging not important. we charge you $4 per connect hour and pay tymnet most of that to cover the packet charges, etc. Note that the trailblazers will not work with tymnet. You either have to call our 800 number or call direct. If you hear anything that sounds really bad, please let me know as we probably have fixed that an dit is no longer a problem. (At least I do not currently know of any major problems) ============================================================================ From uw-beaver!ames!ll-xn!ames!lll-lcc!lll-winken!uunet!pcrat!rick Mon Mar 7 04:32:42 1988 It was bad for awhile there. There was some problem with the sequent -- 56kbit -- X.25 pad -- tymnet hookup, and the machine kept crashing. But it's been pretty solid lately. I switched to the 'Blazer two months ago, and used the 800 number for awhile. It, too became clogged, but they've just added 6 more lines, and beefed up the disk. After I realized that the $10/hour for the 800 number was (slightly) more expensive than just paying the (AT&T) L.D. myself and only sending them the $1.50 per hour for local access, that's what I've been using. Your mileage may vary. I don't get a full feed, but my bills are now about $45/month ($30 of which is the subscriber fee). I also pay AT&T $84/month on top of that. ============================================================================ From david@e.ms.uky.edu Sun Mar 6 17:42:52 1988 weeell... we no longer get news from uunet so maybe my answer won't be any help to you. however ... we've had no problem with accessing uunet, but then we've been calling the 800 number. tymnet doesn't charge us directly, instead they charge uunet some per packet fee and uunet figures out an hourly charge to bill us. the uunet machine has had quite a bit of upgrading recently. more memory, more processors, more disk space, more serial ports. the only thing that I'm not happy about is the fact that the bills don't include any sort of detailed breakdown about what the charges cover. they should (at the very least) say what the billing period is, but they doesn't do even do that. ============================================================================ From w3vh!rolfe@uunet.UU.NET Sat Mar 5 13:55:42 1988 To: uunet!tc.fluke.COM!battan@uunet.UU.NET [[ I included that To: line for interest. It's wrong...-Jim ]] UUNET has had some growing pains, but the problems you saw referred to earlier have now been fixed. The underlying "problem" was that the demand for the service was greater than they had anticipated, and they've had to play catchup to get the hardware upgraded along with demand. They just got a bunch more 800 lines, so that route should be no problem. Tymnet is $4/hr off-peak, and it is certainly possible to get your full feed between midnight and 8AM. (of course, with Tymnet, you're limited to the speed of the Tymnet node, either 1200 or 2400 baud, so your Trailblazer wouldn't do you much good.) I use the direct number as a fallback when *both* Tymnet and the 800 number are hosed for some reason. That has been very rare of late. Normally, the 800 numbers should be every bit as good as the direct number, but with a Trailblazer, you might find it cost-effective to call the direct number anyway. A friend who lived in Pennsylvania did a careful cost analysis and came to that conclusion. ============================================================================ From mtxinu!psivax!rabbit Fri Mar 4 22:59:16 1988 From: mtxinu!rabbit@psivax.psi.siemens.COM We call UUNET via 1200 baud modems over Tymnet. Things have been ok lately. They were worse before but better now. I think we're running a little under normal 1200 baud transfer rates. But if you go with TB I'm sure these things won't matter. I think we've been able to get in every nite (we poll them a few times each nite) and pick up our news. We don't have TB's so I can't comment on that. ============================================================================ From sun!pyramid!pyramid.UUCP!csg Fri Mar 4 17:11:44 1988 UUNET did have some reliability problems. These have mostly been fixed. Even at its worst, though, we thought the service was as least as good as that provided by any of our netnews neighbors. If you use a TrailBlazer, you don't use Tymnet. Much cheaper to call directly. You pay your own phone bill ($8/hour), and UUNet bills you at $1.50/hr. At the speed of a TrailBlazer, that's a lot cheaper than Tymnet's $4/hr. The machine does get pretty busy after midnight, but there's still plenty of bandwidth left. ============================================================================ From wa3wbu!john@uunet.UU.NET Tue Mar 8 00:11:20 1988 To: uunet!tc.fluke.COM!battan@uunet.UU.NET I have been using UUNET since last September. Over that time there had been occasional problems with the Tynmet nodes. UUNET charges $4.00 hour for the 1200 baud Tymnet access. I am going in with my Trailblazer on their direct line and it costs $1.50/hr. Their 1-800 number I beleive runs in the $10/hour range. Overall, conditions have greatly improved over the last three months on UUNET. They have updated their communications processors significantly and have also just added 560MB of disk. I rarely get a busy signal on the direct line and enjoy very good throughput. I have found them to be a very viable link overall and would recommend them to anyone seeking a link to USENET. ============================================================================ From mfci!bronson@uunet.UU.NET Tue Mar 8 12:18:36 1988 uunet seems to be getting better w/age. Over the weekend we connected with them and got 2-3M/hour. Many of their problems were with the 2400 Tymenet. If you ask me it should only be used for international calls. I love the trailblazers. (yes they are a bit flakely, but maybe the release 4.0 of the firmware will help) ============================================================================ From ssc-vax!shuksan!tahoma!hrsw2!bakken Thu Mar 10 22:30:42 1988 I was at the UUNET/USENET BOF at the Dallas USENIX a few weeks ago and I've included my notes from it (as well as from the CSNET BOF, in case you're interested). We are going to get the Trailblazers up on a few of our sites and connect with uunet. I may even get a trailblazer and uunet connection at home (at my own expense - thats how highly I think of the modems). Please note that we don't have them in yet and we are not world class communications or USENET gurus. Please feel free to call me if you have any questions. Dave Bakken uw-beaver!apcisea!tahoma!hrsw2!bakken (206) 277-2751 -The meeting was led by Rick Adams of the Center for Seismic Studies in Arlington, Virginia. Rick works on UUNET after his own job and in lieu of sleep. -UUNET is no longer an experiment for USENIX - they are now gearing up for a permanent setup. This will include hiring 2 1/2 people and finding a site of their own in the next year or two. UUNET would have been self-sustaining in a few months but with these new plans the self-substinence will be pushed back to 1989. UUNET has about 250 subscribers now. -The sequent has been crashing a lot but that seems to have been ironed out in the last month or so. -People are having throughput problems with TYMENET and are getting about 200 cps on "2400 baud". TYMENET insists UUNET has a 56K baud line but Rick Adams says they are positive it is 19.2K baud because they get much less than 19.2 bps rather than the ~30Kbps you would expect with a 56K baud line. -The Trailblazer setup has been a "rousing success". They are getting 5500-13000 bps and even 4000-5000 from Chile (Rick Adams was amazed that they got anything). UUNET has 2 800 lines with Trailblazer Plusses and will add 6 more as soon as ATT installs the lines. (A side note - Telebit extended their UUCP site 50% discount (~$670 cost) until the end of March. See me or mail telebit!modems for info. I talked to the Telebit folks at UniForum and they said they doubted it would be sold mail order or any other discount in the near future because it is a high performance, specialized communications tool and not a commodity item like the 2400 baud modems you can get by mail order for <$200. Thus this offer, which is not likely to be extended again, is the last time the price of a Trailblazer Plus will be below $1000 for at least 12-18 months, in my opinion.). The Trailblazer Plus looks like it is sending faster than it is receiving because it has a large buffer. -UUNET has about 125M of source on line but is getting in a 600M disk RSN. It will also have the facesaver data on it (256x256x1 bit/person). -It takes 25 [sic???] hours (@2400 TYMENET) to get the complete X distribution from UUNET. This is much faster and cheaper [sic??] than the 6 weeks and $150 from MIT. -Don't use * in transfers. -MMP modems have not been working well with auto-reliable and UUCP. -I asked how often most UUNET connections called it during bankers hours. Rich said that varies quite a bit, with some minimizing costs and only taking mail during the evening and others haveing UUNET call them when they have mail in. I was very interested in this because if most or many of the sites would UUNET call them when mail was in you would have a very good chance of sending email within North America (especially the bigger cities and universities) and getting a reply back during the same work day. -CSNET and BITNET can be reached by UUNET (no details mentioned). -Version 3.0 of the B news should be out in a few months. vnews will have kill files and other more powerful features. -Henry Spencer said the C version of news will be out in a few months. The Alpha version is pretty solid but you have to poke around to install it because the documentation is sparse. They did not bother doing the readers because the B 3.0 is fine. ============================================================================ Well, that's it. Thanks for the responses! If you want to know the answer to the $64 question, yes, we will probably be subscribing. Now if we can only decide which other newsgroups to get. Anyone have comments on the quality and subject matter of the non-backbone groups? Are any of the groups not suitable for a corporate environment (alt.drugs comes to mind)? -- Jim Battan Domain: battan@tc.fluke.COM Voice: +1 206 356 6469 UUCP: {uw-beaver,decvax!microsof,ucbvax!lbl-csam,allegra,sun}!fluke!battan
rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (03/17/88)
> the only thing that I'm not happy about is the fact that the bills don't > include any sort of detailed breakdown about what the charges cover. > they should (at the very least) say what the billing period is, but they > doesn't do even do that. It is correct that the bills do not come in detail (i.e. per call). This is a deficiency that will be corrected "in the future". The raw data exists, but it must be (painfully...) turned into something a normal human can understand. Upon request (e.g. billing disputes) I can and have produced the call detail. It is not automated right now. I don't understand the second part. The current bill says: INVOICE ... For UUNET service for Month, Year for Site SITE. Yes the billing is slightly screwed up. This months project is to totally reconcile the checks received with the invoices sent and see exactly where we stand. This involves going through about 22 inches of paper one by one. It hasn't help that the Berkeley Post office LOST the entire January billing (i.e. we gave them a mailbag full of letters and none of the 250 showed up at the destination within a month). We remailed them a few days ago. Lastly, I think Tymnet has finally gotten the 56kbps handling an aggregate throughput of over 20 kbps. Its hard to tell, as I can't tell when its working, I can only tell when its broken. (Right now I can't find anyting wrong with it, but we are only doing 15-20 simultaneous X.25 connections. The real test is 25-35.) ---rick