david@ukma.uky.csnet (David Herron, NPR Lover) (09/25/86)
[This is going to both all the local groups and also to net.news,
BUT with distribution limited to 'na'. This is partially to reach
the sites we feed in Cincinnati, and also a general warning about
news we feed on out through cbatt. Sorry about the length but I
felt it necessary...]
Situation: We're an average University CS department, and can't
afford thousands of dollars a year to bring news into
our systems. So, shortly after we connected to BITNET
we switched our main feed from cbosgd to psuvm.bitnet
(which, believe it or not, is an IBM-308x running NOTHING
which even closely resembles Unix).
The feed from there has been tolerable. Until now the only problems
were that 1) tabs/formfeeds were translated to spaces/blank-lines
(probably because EBCDIC doesn't know what either is), and 2) the
byte-counts in the news batches were almost always wrong meaning I had
to write a silly program to unbatch them (the wrong way). (hey, it
worked!) Anyway, we could live with both problems.
Recently psuvm has generated a new (and INTOLERABLE) problem. Now,
more than just the tabs and formfeeeds are being translated, now it's
moved to the curly braces ('{' and '}' assuming nothing between you and
me has translated them). This new mucking is changing all these curly
brace characters to colon's! This is TERRIBLY ANNOYING for a lot of
reasons (not to mention that it makes C programs USELESS and hard to
recover).
[As an aside. I commonly see this exact problem in MAIL which comes in
through BITNET.]
The warning to sites "downwind" of us is "Sorry, if it's important try
to get a clean copy from the author, but don't deluge the net with
articles about mucked-up-C-programs and the like. If anything deluge
my mailbox". To be kind to the rest of the net I'm going to stop
feeding news which comes in from psuvm on out to cbatt. (due to a
nifty new feature in 2.10.3 beta... Thanks Rick!)
Stopping the articles from leaking out is nice to everybody else, BUT
it doesn't solve our problem. That is, having a reasonable feed. Like
I said above, we can't afford to feed via phone lines. Also, I *know*
bitnet can be used to do the job for us correctly. We just have to
find a "better" place to feed from. (Bill Verity, if you're reading
this, it's nothing personal, my IBM prejudice is just operating in
overdrive at the moment :-), I hope you understand why).
[The last time I talked about this to the net a bunch of people
whispered "PC-Pursuit" in my ear. I'm looking into using that method
-- it seems like a Very Good route, BUT we're having a bit of trouble
with getting a MasterCard for the University....sigh]
Anyway, back to a possible BITNET feed. I'm asking for volunteer's
to feed us via bitnet. Anybody willing? My preferences are:
1) "close to us". We're connected to the main part of BITNET
via ucccvm1 and ohstvma. I think GaTech has a Unix machine
on BITNET, and they're located on our "branch" even.
2) ASCII. Lets not have any of this EBCDIC artifact bull!
Give me ASCII or give me DEATH!!!! Something that knows
what a TAB is!!! (That leaves out PR1ME's too!)
er... sorry, I got carried away. Anyway, a Unix machine
or a VMS machine would be nice. To avoid problems we'll
have to encode the files in some way (I think the "c7batch"
format in 2.10.3 beta will do nicely). If c7batch turns
out it won't do the trick then we can work something out.
(fr'instance, we're currently feeding a VMS machine via
bitnet using "compress -d | btoa | netcopy").
3) "Full Feed". Please. As full a feed as possible. If I
have to I can live with "important groups" from the new
feed and continue with the less-important groups being
fed from psuvm.
Failing that, this pc-pursuit thing may work out soon and we could afford
to have a uucp feed from any of the 14 magic cities. (It's amazing
what $25/month can buy...).
Whaddaya say? Care to help out a poor community of 50+ news readers?
(not counting the people in Cincinnati...)
--
David Herron, cbosgd!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET, david@ms.uky.csnet
(I'm also "postmaster" at all those addresses)
(And "news" and "netnews" and "uucp" and ....)Q3788@PUCC.BITNET (Netnews) (09/26/86)
In article <4782@ukme.ukma.uky.csnet>, david@ukma.uky.csnet (David Herron, NPR Lover) writes: >Recently psuvm has generated a new (and INTOLERABLE) problem. Now, >more than just the tabs and formfeeeds are being translated, now it's >moved to the curly braces ('{' and '}' assuming nothing between you and >me has translated them). This new mucking is changing all these curly >brace characters to colon's! This is TERRIBLY ANNOYING for a lot of >reasons (not to mention that it makes C programs USELESS and hard to >recover). This may not be the fault of psuvm. Earlier this week Bill Rubin of CUNYVM asked us here at PUCC to dump him some news, which eventually got fed back out to psuvm; I assume that the curly braces translation is associated with any of the news we sent out. I've checked here and the curly braces are stored properly on our machine (EBCDIC x'C0' and x'D0') and we dumped them to CUNYVM using CMS SENDFILE, which should preserve such information. (This was all old news which most machines should already have seen, and thus discarded. You can identify it by looking for the string 'puvax2!PUCC.BITNET' in the Path header.) Irwin Tillman, Netnews Admin, Princeton University Computing Center BITNET: Q3788@PUCC UUCP: ...allegra!psuvax1!PUCC.BITNET!Q3788