bill@carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) (07/25/88)
In article <10030@g.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes: [ discussion of pathalias, name tables, etc. ] > >I think the solution lies over towards regional domains. You set >up a regional domain, announce gateway(s) to that domain and >don't announce any site names (other than necessary) within the >domain to the outside world. The general idea works well with >other domains -- the difference here is that there is no already >existing organizations for the regions to handle the setting >up and such. There's some discussion about this going on over in news.sysadmin. It appears that killer has become killer.dallas.tx.usa. While I think that might be a confusing concept to those already confused by the fundamental concept (like me!) it makes a bunch of sense. I think that Brian and Dave are discussing the addressing implications and I don't disagree with what they said. I'd like to chime in with the delivery implications. We have proliferated usenet over "teapot" sites (I administer four micros, three in u.*, one in d.*) and we have managed to absorb some of that with faster modems, faster networks and such. Dave's proposal for regional domains also offers an opportunity to spread the load for delivery. Greg Hackney (killer!bellboy!hack) has proposed a lashup in Texas that is similar to what mcnc does and the folks in Chicagoland. Establish some well connected sites as the "hosses" and let the others act as tributary delivery sites. I'm taking a lot of license with Greg's proposal, this isn't exactly what he suggested... If we had killer as one of the designated "hosses" for tx.usa then most stuff for Texas would go to killer (I think it does anyway, but bear with me). They could, in turn, drop chunks of news and mail onto "ponies", repeating the process until the "teapots" delivered to the destinations. Regional domains would actually make this easier and it would eliminate some of the friction that occurs due to sheer site population. James Van Artsdalen (killer!bigtex!james) suggests BSMTP and it would, indeed, be a blessing to pack up a pile and send it off batched and compressed. That would require some kind of addressing so that it wouldn't have to be unpacked before it could be forwarded, but a regional domain would certainly help with that. I didn't mean to suggest that others haven't been exploring the same kinds of things, I pointed out James and Greg because we have discussed the subjects among ourselves. This brings me to the "teapot" point. As one or more micro sites I am acutely aware of the buzzing noise we cause in the larger world of usenet. This was discussed a while back in some other group but it was in the context of "what can a leaf node do?". If the regional domain scheme was in place and some form of BSMTP the "teapots" could quickly and efficiently perform the local and near-local distribution. I suggested this in the earlier discussion regarding news and the response from the "teapots" was overwhelmingly positive. No, we don't have the status or stability of decwrl but we make up for it in sheer numbers. I can commit my site to making many local calls and some LD calls to further the transport of news and mail. From the reaction I got earlier I'll bet that there are several hundred, maybe a thousand SA/owners that feel the same way. That's essentially what AT&T has done. They have dedicated systems with full-time professional staffs whose job it is to see to it that news and mail move smoothly throughout AT&T. I would guess that the rest of the net is as large if not larger than AT&T and we can do the same thing. Perhaps regions aren't the smartest way to do it but it puts geography and time zones on our side. I'd like to hear some input from the UUCP Project on this too. They have been doing this on a different scale for years now and it seems like they would have better ideas than a "teapot". -- Bill Kennedy Internet: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM Usenet: { killer | att | rutgers | uunet!bigtex }!ssbn!bill