smb (09/10/82)
I suggest that as many sites as possible establish alternate transmission paths for net.news.config. By the very nature of the group, there will be some blockage, perhaps in a critical path. Around here, for example, there are many uucp mail links, but essentially all news for unc, mcnc, ncsu, tucc, web40, phs, and a bunch of other machines flows through duke -- if they're down, we're cut off. So I'm going to change my 'sys' file to send that one group to several other sites, just to make sure that the note can get out. --Steve
mark (09/10/82)
smb has an excellent idea, and I encourage sites to have alternate paths, especially if they only have one major news feed. One other thought - it seems to be quite common for a site to have several entries in their sys file that only transmit "to.foo" newsgroups, just to keep the link working. It's probably a good idea to add "all.news.config" to these "to.foo" entries. Of course, if you don't have a uucp (or whatever the local transmission medium is for news) link to site X, you can't send them news over it. But sites that totally depend on one other site polling them for uucp probably ought to think about speaking to some other places too, just to increase reliability. Mark