greid@adobe.UUCP (Glenn Reid) (10/26/85)
This is all very interesting to me. I am undecided who is right and who is being paranoid. One of the big issues seems to be: "If we don't curb this sort of thing now, the whole net will collapse". Is this true? Is is necessary that news feeds be so centralized, the result being that they cannot *afford* to propagate the news? It strikes me that there are a large number of sites on USENET, and that the connectivity is relatively low. This means that a lot of the news gets sent from Boston to San Francisco between two "backbone" sites who incur all the phone bills, then gets locally distributed to all the smaller sites who read it, post flames, and run up the phone bills of the "hub" sites. This is an oversimplification, of course, but tends to be true. Question: What gains can be made in terms of more carefully chosen news connections? Can they be maintained separately from regular uucp/mail connections? (I doubt it). Maybe I don't have the big picture (I *know* I don't have the big picture) but maybe some gains can be made in other ways than nuking newsgroups so that the wants of the many are not serviced at the expense of the few. Comments? Glenn Reid decwrl!adobe!greid -- You have new mail.
tanner@ki4pv.UUCP (Tanner Andrews) (10/31/85)
] ... I don't know if news and mail links can be kept seperate. i ] suspect not... It may be of general interest to many people that mail and news links can be seperate. I have some sites already receiving internal (cdi.*) news via a feed from here (to change soon to another site) and which handle mail over less direct paths. We have several mail-only links which do not handle news at all; the news is all handled through one central system. I do not think it is easy to make a news-only link which would reject mail. The means of keeping the links serving only mail is to carefully not list them in the ~news/sys file; this arranges to not queue news for them. -- <std dsclm, copies upon request> Tanner Andrews, KI4PV uucp: ...!decvax!ucf-cs!ki4pv!tanner
friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) (11/01/85)
In article <779@adobe.UUCP> greid@adobe.UUCP (Glenn Reid) writes: > >Question: What gains can be made in terms of more carefully chosen >news connections? Can they be maintained separately from regular >uucp/mail connections? (I doubt it). Maybe I don't have the big >picture (I *know* I don't have the big picture) but maybe some gains >can be made in other ways than nuking newsgroups so that the wants >of the many are not serviced at the expense of the few. > >Comments? > This sounds like a good idea to me! Does anyone have any idea how to go about implementing it? Perhaps if news admins of sites *recieving* thier news from distant sites could look for closer sites to use as news feeds and arrange to switch to the local site it would help. Especially if the remote site were a backbone site. Maybe backbone sites that are feeding more than on remote site in a given geographical area could mail them a suggestion to arrange local cross-feeding. Maybe more backbone sites with carefully chosen connections would alleviate the problem. -- Sarima (Stanley Friesen) UUCP: {ttidca|ihnp4|sdcrdcf|quad1|nrcvax|bellcore|logico}!psivax!friesen ARPA: ttidca!psivax!friesen@rand-unix.arpa
sewilco@mecc.UUCP (Scot E. Wilcoxon) (11/07/85)
In article <481@ki4pv.UUCP> tanner@ki4pv.UUCP (Tanner Andrews) writes: >... >We have several mail-only links which do not handle news at all; the >news is all handled through one central system. I do not think it is >easy to make a news-only link which would reject mail. ... Easy. Make the uucp link name (in L.sys) be different than the news system name. In news "sys" file, to send to system "abc": abc:net,mod,na,usa,mn::uux - xyz!rnews Where uucp "L.sys" file has an entry to call a system "xyz". This assumes that your uucico will not complain about the remote name calling itself "abc" when trying to send files to "xyz". Strictly speaking, the news link could still be used for mail but people would have to know the path was called "xyz". News would only show the public system names, not the private link names. Of course, you could always alter rmail or uucico... -- Scot E. Wilcoxon Minn. Ed. Comp. Corp. circadia!mecc!sewilco 45 03 N / 93 15 W (612)481-3507 {ihnp4,mgnetp}!dicomed!mecc!sewilco