jim@crom2.uucp (James P. H. Fuller) (05/16/91)
lyndon@cs.athabascau.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: > There are enough machines out there providing anonymous UUCP access > to software archives that use of BITFTP from UUCP sites is no longer > justifiable. If you want the software, you can bloody well pay your own > phone line charges to pick it up. Maybe you didn't want that software so > badly after all ... True for system-related software. There are tons of places to get EMACS and Perl and pathalias and so on. But emphatically *not* true for other kinds of software -- in particular scientific software, which is one of the principal justifications of the Internet, and BITNET, and BITFTP. Let's say your site gets a bionet.all feed and you want to keep your copy of the GenBank genetic sequence database current on a daily basis using bionet.molbio.genbank.updates. The New York University soft- ware to do this is available by anon-ftp from goober.phri.nyu.edu. Can you think of an anon-uucp source for this? (LONG pause while the man thinks....) The same is true for an IMMENSE amount of other scientific software written by researchers and put up for anon-ftp and only anon-ftp. If you shut down BITFTP you're screwing all the legitimate users along with the abusers, including every small college and small research enter- prise in the Known Universe which can't afford a leased-line Internet connection. There must be a more intelligent way! I say THANK YOU to the folks at Princeton through whose good offices outsiders are permit- ted to use BITFTP. (P.S. Thanks also to DEC for the same thing. BITFTP isn't the only ftp-to-mail gateway, as you may know. And thanks to the archive-server sites, though they're a drop in the bucket compared to what's available via ftp.) > As an example of making the user pay, about a year ago I decided to > stop carrying the comp.binaries groups here at AU. There were a number > of reasons for doing this: potential viruses and cost in modem time and > disk space being two of them. When we informed the user community of > the change there was no end of howling and bitching from the PC users > who were used to getting all this "free software" from the net. We > pointed out that it was not "free," as the university was paying > line charges (both leased lines and LD dialup) to transfer these > files, most of which were of little or no use to the operation of > the university. In essence, we said that if they *really* *wanted* > the software, they could dial up any number of BBS's (from home on > their dime) and pick it up that way. That's a very good example of cutting down nonessential use with- out at the same time stomping on the researchers you're there to support. There's a major difference between students who want games for their PCs and faculty members who want software for gene sequencing or amino acid analysis or Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics or numerical taxonomy or gas chromatography or carbon-14 dating of palaeolithic strata or photoelectric photometry of variable stars or.... I'll bet there are people at your own university who have used BITFTP to obtain software of the latter types. After all, you weren't always on the Internet. merce@iguana.uucp (Jim Mercer) writes: > how much of a net.lobby do we have to do to get pucc.princeton.edu to shut > down BITFTP? > > can we at least get them to limit responses to systems that can be verified > as being on BITNET (as i assume the system was intended)? I absolutely agree that there's no reason to try to get EMACS through the mail. But the list of things that are both big enough to cause trouble and easily available from uunet and other big anon-uucp sites is short enough (e.g. the GNU collection, TeX, X windows et al.) to write into a compact list. In fact, why not just *use* uunet's filelist? If you want to lobby Princeton for something, ask them to check all the GET commands against such a list, and bounce disallowed requests. Shutting down BITFTP would solve your mail prob- lems, but so would shutting down iguana. There are more thoughtful solutions than either of these! lyndon@cs.athabascau.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) continues: > What you describe is an unfortunate side effect of running a large > mail relay site. I've run a few of them in my time and I've dealt > with this problem before. I find the best way to deal with it is > to make it very clear to the system administrators of any site you > provide e-mail connectivity to just what sort of traffic you are > willing to forward. Let them know that any violation of those guidelines > could (and probably will) result in the termination of their feed. Amen! This is a problem that site admins are qualified to solve (and paid to solve) on a site-by-site basis, by configuring mailers and by having explicit arrangements with the sites to which they connect, *before* the problem becomes a problem. Every single admin I have ever met has wanted to be considered clever; just saying "Nuke Princeton" is not the way to impress people with your skill in your job. > How you deal with abuses is up to you. I prefer a solution that > doesn't penalize users who did not contribute to the problem. Double amen! Those of us stuck out here in uucp-only-land thank you! ------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------- crom2 Athens GA Public Access Unix | i486 AT, 16mb RAM, 600mb online | AT&T Unix System V release 3.2 Molecular Biology | Tbit PEP 19200bps V.32 V.42/V.42bis Population Biology | Ecological Modeling | Admin: James P. H. Fuller Bionet/Usenet/cnews/nn | {jim,root}%crom2@nstar.rn.com ------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------
6sigma2@polari.UUCP (Brian Matthews) (05/19/91)
lyndon@cs.athabascau.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: |> There are enough machines out there providing anonymous UUCP access |> to software archives that use of BITFTP from UUCP sites is no longer |> justifiable. If you want the software, you can bloody well pay your own |> phone line charges to pick it up. Maybe you didn't want that software so |> badly after all ... There are a lot of sites, but most of the source I really want (like source for non-UNIX machines, beta stuff, scientific reports, etc.) isn't available for anon UUCP. I do use anon UUCP for stuff that's available, but there's only so many times you can use a comp.sources.unix archive. What some kind site needs to do, is set up a mail->ftp->anon uucp service. It would work something like: 1. I mail a request to the server, like the old bitftp request (the machine name, what files I want, getting directory listings, etc.) 2. The server does the ftp request, grabbing the requested files to the machine the server runs on. If the files were already on the requested machine, it doesn't request them, just touches them. 3. The server then replies to my original mail with the transcript of the ftp session (so I get my directory listings, and know whether or not the file requests succeeded.) The mail includes where the files were dropped on the servers machine. 4. The server machine provides anon UUCP, so I call up and UUCP the files I requested. 5. After two weeks (or so) after the last time the files were requested, they are removed. With this scheme, I can access anything on the Internet, and the only machines affected are mine and the server machine. The server then doesn't have to try to archive the known universe, but frequently requested files will tend to hang around, not even requiring an ftp. Comments?
emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) (05/19/91)
In article <4131@polari.UUCP> 6sigma2@polari.UUCP (Brian Matthews) writes:
From: 6sigma2@polari.UUCP (Brian Matthews)
Organization: Seattle Online Public Unix (206) 328-4944
There are a lot of sites, but most of the source I really want (like
source for non-UNIX machines, beta stuff, scientific reports, etc.) isn't
available for anon UUCP. I do use anon UUCP for stuff that's available,
but there's only so many times you can use a comp.sources.unix archive.
What some kind site needs to do, is set up a mail->ftp->anon uucp
service. It would work something like:
Good description. There are a lot of details to attend to to get it
right; it would be best to make sure that not just anonyone could
force this hub site to go out ftp'ing things, since that could easily
fill up its disks and swamp its internet connection. Access will have
to be metered out somehow to control overload.
Most "kind sites" are kind for ulterior motives (sorry), they have
some collection of information that they particularly are interested
in and want to disseminate. Providing a general purpose internet
archive service is work, and doesn't generally make sense for
individual sites to give away for free unless they need it for some
other reason -- BITFTP to get ftp stuff to BITNET paying members,
corporate mail-ftp services to handle bits of the corporation without
direct internet access. Any general purpose UUCP-able dialup archive
service will have to either charge enough to cover marginal costs of
production (or more, if there's any profits to be had) or will always
be short on resources.
(Prices? Who knows? $xx/month + $x.xx/hour + $xx startup, plus telco
charges, looks to be the right order of magnitude.)
--
Edward Vielmetti moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.com