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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!sun-barr!decwrl!atha!lyndon
From: lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Newsgroups: can.uucp,news.config,news.admin
Subject: Warp speed Mr. Scott!
Summary: Doesn't anyone do HOURLY polls any more?
Message-ID: <1059@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Date: 28 Aug 89 18:35:12 GMT
References: <1989Aug21.124002.11054@robohack.uucp>
Organization: Athabasca University
Lines: 44

[ Followups are in news.admin ... ]

I was going to bring this up a while ago, but thought "it's not that big
of a problem."  The following posting made me change my mind.

In article <1989Aug21.124002.11054@robohack.uucp> woods@robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) writes:
>#N	robohack
[ ... ]
>#	NOTE:  I've used DEDICATED to mean those sites who's mail is
>#	delivered immediately, and DIRECT for those queued 'til the next
>#	uudemon.hour run.

It seems to me that everyone has assigned their own arbitrary
definitions to DIRECT, DEMAND, HOURLY, etc., that bear no relation
to the definitions in the README file posted to comp.mail.maps.
In particular, everyone seems to use DIRECT when in fact they
should be using HOURLY. I recently scanned through the
Canadian maps, and found this to be the case for about 85% of
the sites I am familiar with. It turns out that the "well connected"
sites (using Gene Spafford's definition) are the most likely to be
guilty of this practise.

The result is, I'm starting to see some sub-optimal paths being
generated. Take the case where 'a' and 'b' both claim DIRECT
connections to 'c', and 'mysite' consider 'a' and 'b' to be HOURLY
links. There is a 50% chance that pathalias will generate a route
through either of 'a' or 'b' on the way to 'c'. As it turns out,
the b!c link is a truly DIRECT connection, whereas a!c is in fact
an HOURLY call. You get the idea ...

As if that's not bad enough, I now find that on demand local calls
are now weighted as DEDICATED. Does that mean that my 9600bps dedicated
line between atha and aunro is actually a LOCAL+FAST link? Think
about it ...





-- 
Lyndon Nerenberg  VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University
    {alberta,decwrl,lsuc}!atha!lyndon || lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA

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