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From: karl.kleinpaste@osc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.uucp,news.admin
Subject: Re: BITFTP grief!
Message-ID: <1991May17.121003.15644@oar.net>
Date: 17 May 91 13:09:07 GMT
References: <1991May16.224338.286@crom2.uucp>
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jim@crom2.uucp writes:
   >To transfer files we use a tried and true mechanism:  FTP.

   Can you say "0% reliability?"  FTP to uucp-only sites doesn't work
   AT ALL.  What's your advice for them?  "Screw you, Jack, I've got mine?"
   Harrumph!

Oh, blow it out your ear.

It was positively routine when I ran osu-cis' archives to get mail
from people saying, "I've been told that there's a package called
bletch.tar.Z living on foo.bar.baz:pub/extraneous and I really need to
pick it up.  Could you possibly make it available on osu-cis?"

I only turned down requests like that about 5 times in 5 years.  Most
of the time was when we were in serious disc space trouble; once,
someone wanted a 50Mbyte package.  But there's currently ~200Mbytes on
osu-cis mostly unused.

My advice to UUCP-only sites: Go ask for help before screaming about
the inability of any of the existing mechanisms to do the job for you.

Harrumph, yourself.  Tone down your attitude.

[As for whether the current maintainers of osu-cis' archives still work
 that way, I don't know.  Load on its seemingly ever-dwindling staff
 may have made it an untenable proposition.]