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From: kls@ditka.UUCP (Karl Swartz)
Newsgroups: news.config,news.admin
Subject: Re: Warp speed Mr. Scott!
Message-ID: <3872@ditka.UUCP>
Date: 31 Aug 89 07:39:36 GMT
References: <1989Aug21.124002.11054@robohack.uucp> <1059@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Reply-To: kls@ditka.UUCP (Karl Swartz)
Organization: Inaction Central, Los Alamos, New Mexico
Lines: 57

In article <1059@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:
>>#	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.

>It turns out that the "well connected"
>sites (using Gene Spafford's definition) are the most likely to be
>guilty of this practise.

Perhaps the worst offender of all, in view of its number of links,
is uunet.  I posted something about this a while back; they list
nearly all their links as DEMAND when in fact this bears very
little resemblence to reality -- I know of several sites whose
connections from uunet are listed as DEMAND yet they poll uunet
once a night, at best.

Rick Adams' reply:

    "DEMAND indicates a high quality, reliable path through which
    the receiving site wants to receive a lot of traffic."

For nearly everybody else that I know of it indicates a reasonable
degree of expediency, which certainly doesn't match a once-nightly
poll.  You'd think a site like uunet (and the other well-connected
sites) would try to set a *good* example, not a bad one.

Rick also said that sites are ALL (Rick's emphasis) told that they
will be marked as DEMAND the request otherwise.  For one thing,
this is a really poor default, and for another, when I asked the
postmasters of several sites that had recently gotten uunet links
neither one of them had been told anything about map costs.

As I said in my earlier article, I'm not trying to pick on uunet,
but I think in this case they are very wrong.

(Note to fellow map tinkerers: you can't get away with tossing a
simple 'dead {uunet}' or 'adjust {uunet(EVENING)}' in your local
pathalias input since most international links will then try to
go thru obscure backdoor paths.)

>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?

I still use PC Pursuit for some connections.  Since I don't use
PC Pursuit for anything other than uucp perhaps I should mark
all those links as DEDICATED.  8-)

-- 
Karl Swartz		|UUCP		uunet!lll-winken!ames!hc!rt1!ditka!kls
1-505/667-7777 (work)	|Internet	kls@rt1.lanl.gov
1-505/672-3113 (home)	|BIX		kswartz
"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."  (Twain)