karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu (12/13/90)
Archive-name: internet/disease/mbas/1990-12-13 Original-posting-by: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu Original-subject: CompuServe backlog; mail servers Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) Mail-based archive servers are a disease which should be stamped out wherever they are found. A whole slew of CompuServe users appears to have discovered the wonders of bitftp@pucc.princeton.edu in the last week or so, not to mention not a few other similar addresses. Then there's the real humans out there who are sending multi-megabyte blortfuls in to themselves and their pals. The pipe feeding as far as the gateway host here is T1, of course; but CompuServe is not IP-connected, and it's just a 9600bps straw going into CompuServe itself. And we've only got B+ Protocol, not something known for raw throughput capacity. Effective throughput is more like 4800bps. The MX record has been shifted to giza.cis.ohio-state.edu instead of saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu, so that Saqqara trades a lot of additional mindless NFS work for no complex sendmail efforts at all. (We cross-mount our UUCP area.) Nonetheless, we're struggling to keep the load on Saqqara within double digits, UUCP logins are routinely timing out after 60 seconds because /bin/login can't get enough done, and doing backups on it is effectively impossible with the load so high. I'm going to try to balance filesystems again tonight to try to ease the abuse on one drive, but I don't think it'll help much. There has been discussion from time to time about the difficulties of MBASes (mail-based archive servers) using NZIC (non-zero incremental cost) links. The "cost" of being an NZIC link is not necessarily $-related. The $-cost of the CompuServe link is essentially zero, unless one counts my time-as-$ as the admin keeping it afloat; the hassle-cost, admin-cost, and mail-delay-cost of the link have gotten really, REALLY high. We are considering, for the sake of gateway sanity, aggressively blowing away anything that clearly comes from or is going to an archive server. This will require some administrative nonsense that I don't like, because I _really_ don't like peeking in other people's mail. But we have to get control of the machines again. MBASes: Just Say No, because You Don't Know Anything About The Links Between Hither And Yon. --karl