whm (11/04/82)
There seem to be some significant problems with net.sources articles not getting around to everybody that gets net.sources. There are a number of things that have been sent out on net.sources that we haven't gotten, and there are some things that we have sent out from here (notably "bib", the "refer" replacement) that large portions of the net apparently haven't seen. There seems to be an intermittent failure somewhere along the line to us and I was wondering if this problem were net-wide or unique to our corner of the net. We've been on the net for about five weeks and in that time we've gotten 29 net.sources articles, is that about what other people have gotten in the same time period? (If you'd like to check, look for article ihlpd.250, that's the article that we have as "1".) One of the things that we've missed (perhaps other people did as well) was the Vfont expansion/compaction stuff from Donn Seeley, did his stuff get to your system? Obviously, in a network like Usenet, there are going to be failures from time to time, but trouble with net.sources is particularly serious as the items are often large and thus retranmissions or personalized copies can run up a large bill quickly. Just to see if we've got a localized problem here, I'd like you to look on your system for a couple of net.sources articles, arizona.1163 and arizona.1187. (1163 is gcomp.icn, 1187 is part of "bib"). Here's the IMPORTANT part. If you are a terminal node in the net (you send/receive news to/from only one site), or if you have five or more news neighbors, please look for the above files on your system and let me know what you find. Thanks, Bill Mitchell p.s. I'll report back on this around the first of next week. (If not sooner.)