telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (02/18/89)
Shortly after taking over the reigns at TELECOM Digest from long time moderator jsol, I began looking for a local site to use for the day-to-day tasks involved in publishing the Digest. Some thought was given to making chinet the base of operations, and Randy Suess, sysadmin for that site gave his full blessings to the move. The only problem there was that chinet is not an Internet site, and the delivery of the Digests would have been more difficult and time consuming. Chinet is still the official back-up site for the Digest. That is, should there be some difficulty here at eecs which caused an interupption to Digest processing, then everything would move to chinet where it could start up almost immediatly. When Jacob Gore, postmaster@eecs.nwu.edu made an account available, it seemed to be an ideal arrangement: (a) Internet access (b) local dial up lines in the community resulting in one-unit-stay-connected-all-night access from my home (c) 2400 baud access with much faster throughput than I had become accustomed to on PC Pursuit; and a machine with which I have at least some familiarity. Now we have been here at eecs.nwu.edu for one week. And what a week it has been! At bu-cs, subscribers on bitnet were dispatched through the buacca machine; the accepted bitnet gateway for Boston University. All bitnet names -- 45 or so of them -- were in the main mailing list. With some dismay, I found out Monday last that the bitnet gateway here, a machine called nuacc, was not quite able to deal with that many Digests stuffed in at one time. We found out when bitnet readers began sending very desparate messages saying 'no less than *20* copies each of issues 59 and 60 showed up in their boxes...'. After some consultation with the people at nuacc, an exploder address for bitnet was set up there. Now I send but *one copy* of the Digest through the gate to nuacc, and let it redistribute itself there instead of here. The foreign sites have been troublesome also, but we are working on this at the present time. I think the copies to London and Singapore have not been delivered at all this week. And now tonight, Friday, I have reason to believe about 6 messages sent to the Digest on Thursday and Friday were lost; in any event they are not here now, but they were here. If you wrote Thursday or Friday, I suggest you write me again. Slowly, but surely, and I think with very positive results, [TELECOM Digest] is falling in place again after the move. Thanks very much for your several kind letters the past few days, which were not for publication, which have given me a lot of encouragement in my work. The Digest and comp.dcom.telecom are becoming active and widely read. The quality of your messages to the Digest in recent weeks has been the main reason for this, I'm sure. Patrick Townson