Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!uwm.edu!spool.mu.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!ox.com!ox.com!emv From: emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: NetFind and its Internet load Message-ID: Date: 3 May 91 07:22:35 GMT References: <1991May2.180737.29852@csn.org> Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator) Organization: OTA Limited Partnership, Ann Arbor MI. Lines: 62 In-Reply-To: xcaret@csn.org's message of 2 May 91 18:07:37 GMT I'll believe all of the quantitative measurements about NetFind being sparing of Internet resources, carefully sending out as few packets as possible and not doing anything stupid. Think of it as an expert system, where the expert modeled is the "expert internet user". From the description of it, I think that an expert internet user like myself could do a better job, though perhaps not as quickly, because I have access to more specialized and better databases than just DNS/SMTP/finger, and more tricky and unobvious ways of looking. My major problem with tools like NetFind is that although they address the "resource discovery" problem for a single user, they don't have any positive side-effects for the rest of the internet. Nothing about NetFind adds to any Internet infrastructure; it doesn't make the problem any easier for the next person down the line or somewhere else who has the same problem. In comparision, the efforts of the various X.500 projects produce something tangible that the rest of the network can consume later. Systems which consume Internet resources and don't have any positive benefits for the rest of the network are Evil and Rude, no matter how small the resources are that they consume. Things which have been placed into this category at various times are email-based archive servers (because of their accidental and heavy loads on transit mail systems), network management by means of pinging random machines, "mail throughput testers" which send mail through a congested system to see how congested the mail system is (!?), and rebroadcasting huge binaries to usenet newsgroups upon the request of one or two people who missed it. A badly implemented NetFind could fall into this category; there's no sign that it actually does. In this particular case, however, since the research has been published, the prospective user of NetFind can look up the algorithms involved and see just how clever the product is before buying. Since most of the ad hoc expert systems for Internet user location haven't been written down, codified, and studied, this is useful information which deserves a closer look. See also latour.colorado.edu:/pub/RD.Papers/White.Pages.ps.Z a preprint of the NetFind paper in the Journal of Internetworking. If I read the paper the right way, users of NetFind are expected to monitor usenet news and store a database of hostname / organization pairs on disk, like the following MH scan would do: scan -format '%{Organization} %{From}' and keep this around for a while (after trimming out user names). Modulo a few goofy things you'll see with people putting their own headers (scan alt.sex.pictures to see that) and bland usenet-internet gateways (see this newsgroup for that) that information's rather good. Keep it for a few months, for the newsgroups you expect to care about, and your ability to find people should be substantially enhanced. -- Msen Edward Vielmetti /|--- moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.com "(6) The Plan shall identify how agencies and departments can collaborate to ... expand efforts to improve, document, and evaluate unclassified public-domain software developed by federally-funded researchers and other software, including federally-funded educational and training software; " High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, S. 218