mark (02/13/83)
The net is about to undergo some major reconfiguration, and this seems like a good time to reorganize some of the major hub sites. Specifically, harpo is about to fade into the boonies of the net, so we desperately need a Bell Labs site or two to become the primary gateways into/out of BTL to replace harpo. We also need some more organization in California (especially Los Angeles, although San Diego, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco could stand some cleaning up too) and on the ARPANET. A backbone site is one that we bend over backwards to make delivery of news as reliable and fast as possible, so it can feed news to less main sites in the same general area. Such sites currently include decvax, harpo, ucbvax, duke, and to a lesser extent seismo, teklabs, microsoft, sdcarl, and so on. A backbone site should be a large, robust machine, that can handle connections of at least 6-10 USENET neighbors. (It helps a lot to run Berkeley 4.1BSD and have uucp subdirectories installed.) The site should have at least one reliable 1200 baud dialer, and be willing to spend some money on long distance phone calls to send news to other backbone sites (although depending on who your neighbors are, a phone budget isn't always necessary - ucbvax and duke don't have one). Backbone sites should pass along all newsgroups to their neighbors (except for a few officially blacklisted newsgroups like net.jokes.q). They should run a recent version of news software (either A or B) and the contact person there should be someone who is active on the network and who responds quickly when they receive electronic mail. These are not all absolute requirements, but show the kind of attributes that help. Would any interested persons/sites please drop me a line? Mark Horton