trb (03/13/83)
I've had enough of people who need a mail path from x to y because "The accursed Harpo machine seems to be mute in that direction." (Quote from Eric J. Wilner, sdccsu3!ee163cz.) One little VAX can only handle so much traffic. Brian Redman was not hired by Bell Labs to be everybody's personal uucp adminstrator. Here's a novel idea. You need a uucp path from your machine to some other machine? Call the administrator of the other machine and set one up. You can't pay the bills? Then you gotta beg some philathropic intermediary to forward your mail. You'd better say please. You're bitching about harpo? What the hell does harpo owe you? What does this network owe harpo or decvax? I just can't believe that people have the nerve to grub money out of other people's pockets and then complain when they come up short. I'm not saying that there's something wrong with an impoverished little school (ucsd?) getting a little monetary help from industry, I just don't want to hear any complaints about it. Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
karn (03/13/83)
While I probably would not have expressed it in quite the same language Andy did, I agree with him that those seeking mail paths should do a little more of the work for themselves. It is unfair to generate 5 or 10 duplicate long distance telephone calls all around the country, not to mention the added system loads, just to take your mail; besides, YOU get much better service if you set up a direct link. Ma Bell (the telephone companies, not Bell Labs) already does an excellent job of routing telephone calls between any two arbitrary points on the continent; there's not much point in duplicating her work, especially since it ends up costing more, even if you ARE paying only a small part of it. Of course, if the word gets around that you've been doing a lot of work on your L.sys file, you'll suddenly find YOURSELF becoming the major gateway. I speak from experience. Phil Karn
dee (03/15/83)
Well, if everyone set up a direct path to everyone they ever sent some mail to, the result would be unmaintainable. And the number of nodes is growing. Maybe someone should set up a node that you could subscribe to that would be totally supported by charging fees for forwarding mail. That would potentially reduce all mail to two hops. Or something more like the Arpanet routing should be implemented with reasonable connectivity to cut things down to a "few" hops. Donald Eastlake
crp (03/18/83)
Speaking of accounting and charging for net costs...
I would like to offer the opinion that usenet is as successful as
it is (and you may take your own estimate of its success) in large
part due to the fact that it is not a budget line item at almost
any site and that news and mail forwarding are provided gratis.
It certainly isn't as efficient as it could be; auto routing based
on link cost, for example, could make it much more cost effective
(as well as more convenient).
On the other hand, I think the net would not exist if it had to be
tremendously efficient and services had to be specifically paid for.
Consider, those who deal in money things, what it would take to convince
your company or school to pay another site actual real money for such
a nebulous service as net.general or mail forwarding.
Automobiles are a terribly inefficient form of transport, but the
auto will survive for a long time because it is tremendously
convenient -- and that is worth a lot to an individual.
Calling long distance on demand during the day is exactly the same
sort of convenient inefficiency and it will survive too.
Note that some sites bear a disproportionate amount
of network traffic and phone costs and thus help to make usenet work.
Two sites leap to mind - decvax and ucbvax (not to ignore others).
I think it is appropriate to say "thank you" to these sites and
their administrators for helping to make the usenet electronic
community a reality.
As a closing note, I *do* think that network efficiency is a concern
now that the network is a reality.
The network has reached a point where mail, at least, is very unwieldy
and most mail no doubt travels further than it would need to if the
sender understood the way all of the sites were connected together.
A transport system which would perform automatic routing based on
knowledge of node connections, node traffic, and link cost is non-trivial.
Only if someone is willing to build such a system (Mark?????) gratis
will it get done in any complete way.
Sites might be willing to pay a nominal amount for such a piece of
software, but probably not enough to make it a business proposition.
Charlie Price -- NBI (The Word Processing Folks!)
{allegra|princeton|ucbvax}!nbires!crptrb (03/23/83)
Wake up friends. Some guy just said that some sites carry the bulk of netnews traffic. He mentioned decvax and ucbvax. Maybe DEC has a couple of USENET machines, maybe UCB has a dozen. Uhm, excuse me. There's this company called Bell Telephone Laboratories which has HUNDREDS of machines on the net, and BTL forwards more mail and news than even (!) decvax. By far. I don't want to hear some college kid saying "why shouldn't they, it's all telco revenue anyway?" Telco revenue doesn't get credited to our BTL organizations, but our telephone bills get taken out of BTL budgets. Maybe I'm a little crabby this early in the morning, but I just can't understand how senseless some people can be. Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
ld (03/25/83)
Wake up friends. Some guy just said that some sites carry the bulk of
netnews traffic. He mentioned decvax and ucbvax. Maybe DEC has a
couple of USENET machines, maybe UCB has a dozen. Uhm, excuse me.
There's this company called Bell Telephone Laboratories which has
HUNDREDS of machines on the net, and BTL forwards more mail and news
than even (!) decvax. By far. I don't want to hear some college kid
saying "why shouldn't they, it's all telco revenue anyway?" Telco
revenue doesn't get credited to our BTL organizations, but our
telephone bills get taken out of BTL budgets.
Maybe I'm a little crabby this early in the morning, but I just can't
understand how senseless some people can be.
Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
Sorry Andy, BTL may forward more news and mail than any other en-
tity, but it appears to be forwarding only within Ma-Bell. Of
course this would be true, since there are more Bell sites than
outsiders. But then, installing a new Bell site do not cost real
licensing fees (hence the proliferation) and they have been in-
stalling sites longer than any other group.
When the statement was made that `some sites carry the bulk of
netnews traffic', he was referring to carrying it long distance
(expensive phone charges). I extracted all the `From:' lines in
net.general (we keep files 2 weeks) and did a little massaging to
see who sends news across the US. Here are the results:
articles connection
29 decwrl!decvax
4 hplabs!hao*
14 hplabs!hao!seismo
11 sri-unix!cca
4 ucbvax:decvax
*I included this connection because it represents a connection between the
western 1/3 of the US. Of course, I am biased, so take it with a grain
of salt. I happen to know that there is a major WE site in Denver.
While it is true that BTL may be spending a fortune mailing to it-
self, we in the real world do not particularly care what it's
internal financial difficulties are. I will not bore you with
HP's internal cost transfers (often called funny money). It is
not a matter of how many machines are forwarding news, it is a
matter of how far any single jump is.
Of course it costs the Bell System money even for them to make a
long distance call (they cannot generate `real' revenue on the
line if it is in use by Bell). So it is hardly fair to say that
they have the equipment to make free cross country connections.
However ... they are in a position to prod their communication en-
gineers to solve the problem of making data transfer more cost ef-
fective by improving the performance of their system and (heaven
forbid) lowering the long distance tariffs. This does not mean
that they can EASILY convince the engineers to make such a change,
I know how burocracies are. It just means that they are in a
BETTER position than I am (or any other non-Bell person).
Thanks for reading my senseless babble,
Larry Dwyer
Hewlett Packard Co.
ucbvax!hpda!ld
PS: Thank you DEC for decwrl!decvax.trb (03/27/83)
hpda!ld says that BTL only forwards news within the Bell System and doesn't pay for its UNIX use. Again, what are you talking about? My site alone (floyd) forwards net.all to two non-bell sites (cmcl2 and peri) and we forward some news to idis. harpo forwards to seismo, decvax, utah-cs and others. It has in the past forwarded to esquire, uwisc, and other remote sites. BTL sites forward to stolaf, princeton, cornell, and others. That's only netnews, we forward loads of mail too, all over. You really seem to talk from ignorance. And we have to pay "use fees" for each UNIX machine we use. You can call it funny money, but especially in these tight economic times and tough divestiture times, I don't think that any of the money a department has to spend is funny. And who pays for UNIX development? Your piddly license fees? Ha! We're a pretty big company and until now we've been distributing UNIX from the goodness of our heart, not for profit. We might take in a million dollars a year or so on UNIX but that's just a drop in the Bell System bucket, not a major corporate force. I'm not saying that the Bell System or the UNIX Support people are only God's gift to the rest of USENET, I'm just annoyed when people take ignorant potshots. Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491