Rayan Zachariassen <rayan@neat.ai> (07/06/88)
In fact, welcome to both the mailing list and the newsgroup. This is intended to be a forum for discussion, announcements, bashing, problem reports, and general expression related to Sun (the company and their products). Discussion about competitive products should also be encouraged as long as it is relevant to the audience. First some history: For some time there has been a Sun User's Group (SUG) at UofT, and there has been a desire to turn the local mailing list into a newsgroup of some kind. Moreover, we have apparently had enquiries from other sites to "be in on" what's going on here, so the idea was to create a regional or country-wide newsgroup to facilitate communication between sites. Then a "Canadian Sun User's Group" got started up (it still is, see the next message) with representatives from various southern Ontario sites showing up at the inaugural meeting. At that meeting it was agreed to start up a mailing list for ``members''. In the beginning mostly to have an organized and cheap way of putting out calls for meetings, but later also as a more timely (and Canadian) version of Sun-Spots. The third reason I personally have for doing this is that the 1-hour Canadian Birds-Of-a-Feather at Usenix turned into a 3-hour bashing of Sun(s), so obviously there are a lot of people out there who want to talk (right? right.). So about a month or two ago I sent out a message to can.general stating reason #1 above and saying that if I didn't hear any objections I'd create can.sun-stroke. I didn't hear any comments at all, although in retrospect that might have been because the silly B-news sites out there ate my message. Grumble. At the time I attributed it to the notorious Canadian Lack Of Passion (aka apathy). When I got the list of attendees at the first meeting, it seemed like an appropriate time to make good on my threat to create the newsgroup, and decided to set up bi-directional gatewaying to the list of CanSUG people. Consequently the following addresses now exist on ai.toronto.edu: sun-stroke feeds mailing list and newsgroup with can distribution sun-stroke-ont feeds mailing list and newsgroup with ont distribution sun-stroke-people feeds mailing list only and by convention: sun-stroke-request administrivia requests for mailing list I'm not sure how people will want to use these options, but I suggest we stick to just 'sun-stroke' until someone complains about the predictable meeting announcements coming out of Moosehead... Now, as for those of you not in southern Ontario... you will probably already have experience with "Canadian" organizations that aren't. I suspect that below a certain critical mass, this is an endemic problem. Having no affiliation with any such organization, I feel free to suggest that you might want to set up regional mailing lists, meetings or feeds into the sun-stroke group with a regional distribution. Someone from the "Canadian Sun User's Group" should probably address the issue in this forum, perhaps after the next meeting? Incidentally, I have no affiliation with these guys other than offering utai as the mail relay (if messages are going to go through us anyway, better they only do so once...; besides we can get to every network there is). For people without news access, the address to mail to is: sun-stroke@ai.toronto.edu or sun-stroke@ai.utoronto.ca or utai!sun-stroke At least the following UUCP hosts know about utai: watmath,ubc-cs,alberta,dalcs,garfield,utgpu,utcsri,utzoo,lsuc,yunexus,uunet Don't feel bashful about posting. rayan