Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!unido!laura!mp
From: mp@laura.UUCP (Michael Pickers)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: makin' profit at unido (Was : Re: An apology...)
Message-ID: <1466@laura.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jul 89 18:05:00 GMT
References: <786@redsox.bsw.com> <263@icdi10.UUCP> <1444@laura.UUCP> <4892@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: mp@laura.UUCP (Michael Pickers)
Followup-To: news.admin
Organization: University of Dortmund, W-Germany
Lines: 69


For those who don't know me yet, I'm one of the 'postmaster@unido.uucp'.
I think it is time again to straighten out some missunderstandings
about 'unido'.

One of my collegue wrote the following stupid sentence by mistake:

 >In article <1444@laura.UUCP>, jf@laura.UUCP (Jan-Hinrich Fessel) writes:
 > We have to spend money for running the backbone and for getting a
 > computer on which we can do serious work, because our university
 > is not willing to pay or contribute system-time anymore, and noone
 > is donating us anything.

This is meant totaly differently than it sounds. Up to now, the backbone
and the machine where we, the postmasters, answer mail are totally
seperate machines. The backbone machine has indeed been payed by the
money we take because 2 years ago, when we had to upgrade our old backbone,
there was *no* company that was willing to donate a suitable machine.
(The old backbone was indeed a donation, but it was too small [Siemens
MX2 = 10 Mhz NS 32032, 180 Mb disk space only]. Today we have a Siemens
MX500 = Sequent Balance = 10 * 10 Mhz NS 32032, > 1Gb disk space, but that's
rather new, the daily throughput is *at least* 60 Mb)
In some other European countries this might look differently, but in Germany
this hasn't worked yet.  The machine where we answer our mail is one of the
machines owned and payed by the university and it is used for other things
as well. We are now at a point, where the university is *not* able to give us
the neccessary resources for our daily postmaster work any more (that means
no CPU-cycles, no Disk-space)

We have just recently *puchased* another disk for the backbone machine and
we will now move over to our own machine. (That's how we got > 1Gb. disk
space now, a couple weeks ago we only had a total of 500 Mb. For a
central backbone you have to think in different dimensions than an AT-clone
with XENIX)

If you are able to give us a machine that is *strong* on IO, with reasonable
standard UNIX (from our viewpoint that's BSD), strong on networking (we
are moving towards IP inside EUnet) and proper support in case of
HW-failures, we will certainly look into it. Up two now no computer
manufacturer in W-Germany (or branch of a US manufacturer located in Germany)
was willing to support EUnet in Germany that strong.
There is only one manufacturer that is cooperative, that is Siemens.
In pratice that means we got the machine itself a litte cheaper,
and we have direct support from the UNIX kernel team in Munich.
But the realy big and fast disks we have to buy ourself.
(or for example our modems, PADs, the X.25 rotary...)

 >Call it not making a profit, but the fees are being used to subsidize your
 >research computing, assuming these remarks refer to unido.  Presumably connect
 >and monthly fees to unido would be lower if this were not the case.

I think at this point it should be clear that we do *not* subsidize the
research computing of the University by our fees and we have never
chared for connect time.

Just a short notice on another topic. In Europe the current customers of
the services of EUnet want a reliable service. That's why we can not use
private company lines to the US which might go out of service the next
day just because the management wants so. When 'unido' is offline for
just a couple hours, and we havn't told anyone in advance, you can count
on it that the phone will ring within 30 minutes and from then on constantly
until we fix the problem.

          Michael Pickers
          Computer Science Department, University of Dortmund
          IRB - Informatik Rechner Betriebsgruppe
          4600 Dortmund 50, P.O. Box 500500, W.-Germany
          E-mail address UUCP: mp@unido.uucp (...uunet!unido!mp)
          BITNET: mp@unido.bitnet