Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!karl_kleinpaste From: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Wanted: help starting archive mail server Message-ID: Date: 27 Jun 90 19:45:19 GMT References: Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 44 peter@ficc.ferranti.com writes: Why should we have to switch to an even more expensive transport mechanism? Because MBASes inflict their costs on a blortful of unsuspecting good neighbors. The person who wants the stuff ought to be the one who pays for it. If you guys offering anonymous UUCP would standardise your chat scripts it'd probably be a different matter. That'll be darn near impossible. Around here, most people get into osu-cis via a Micom port selector that can be kindly described as temperamental, at least in conjunction with the varying UUCP flavors out there. Common suggestion to people having trouble is to dial the Micom a couple of times by hand to see what the timing looks like at their end. Direct dial-ins to our machines are scarce, and you might be surprised by the number of people who are truly clueless on how to deal with a chat script of _any_ kind -- "standardization" would not help. (E.g., "What is `\c' by itself supposed to do?" Well, duh, it means "do nothing." I would think people setting up UUCP links would know that. A lot don't seem to.) The irony is that it's us UUNET customers that are likely the main store and forward sites you're trying to protect. Not based on the source of most requests I've seen to set up mail-based service to osu-cis' archives -- I get a couple each month. Few such requests arrive by paths which have any reference to uunet in them. In the month of May, (the apparent) osu-cis serviced total Uanon connect time of 24 days 13:11 (107,351 minutes). That's more than 3/4 duty cycle of at least one Uanon at all times. I think that there's rather a lot of somebodies out there who think that access to such an archive is worth the cost. The fact that uunet started such access (via the 1-900-GOT-SRCS route) tends to support that view. As I type this, osu-cis is shoveling bits at 9 sites, 5 news/mail neighbors and 4 Uanon users -- that is to say, his lines are maxed out (there are 7 lines otherwise occupied, or dead). --karl -- Depression \di-'presh-un\ n. A condition observed on return from 3 weeks' vacation to find ~2000 mail messages waiting for oneself.