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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: BITFTP grief!
Message-ID: <1991May18.172953.3331@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
References: <1991May16.145758.6817@uu.psi.com> <1991May16.224338.286@crom2.uucp> <1991May17.183950.25550@agate.berkeley.edu>
Distribution: na
Date: Sat, 18 May 1991 17:29:53 GMT

In article <1991May17.183950.25550@agate.berkeley.edu> jbuck@janus.Berkeley.EDU (Joe Buck) writes:

>No, the answer for UUCP-only sites who can't anonymous FTP is to anonymous
>UUCP.  There are a number of sites that provide this service; osu-cis,
>uunet (in addition to providing the service for regular customers, they
>have a 900 number so anyone can use the service).

Not the same at all.  Has anyone measured the average time between when
a posting appears in comp.archives about some program's availability
and the time it appears in an anon-uucp site?  In most cases it's somewhere
approaching infinity...  And, when they do show up there, how do you
find out about it?  Are you supposed to uucp the huge ls-lR.Z file
daily?  Plus, there's the problem that the ftp'able version is always
kept up-to-date on its home site but the uucp-able copies may have
dozens of bugs that can cost the users months of work to fix.  Don't
take this as a flame towards the maintainers of the anon-uucp sites.  I
do use and appreciate their services, but it's an impossible job.

>The answer to reducing
>the long distance charges is for UUCP-only folks to set up more archive
>sites and more anonymous UUCP sites.  For those that wail, "but it costs
>money if I do that", it costs money whether you place the call yourself
>or pass the bill onto someone else.

I don't have a problem with the phone charges or uunet-style access
fees. $100/month will shovel a heck of a lot of source code through
uunet.  I'm not asking anyone but my organization to pay this, and
I can point out to them that it's cheaper and faster than paying someone
to write similar code at the typical 30 lines per day rate.  The LD
charges are the least of the problem anyway.  Unless you have an
archive site that is a local no-cost call (and around the Chicago
area there is hardly any such thing as a local call) it probably won't
cost any more to call a different state across the country.

>No one's saying "Screw you, Jack"; you have alternatives.  They are simply
>saying that they won't subsidize your large file transfers.

And what's the alternative that lets me get a current directory listing
from an ftp site that has offered to make something available?  Uunet
has someone that handles ftp requests, but I would feel uncomfortable
asking a person to check a remote directory on a weekly basis.  It didn't
bother me at all to make such requests through bitftp.

Obviously, the answer is to automate the requests at the uucp <-> internet
gateways like uunet and other sites that want to offer similar services
but the existing software doesn't provide any real support for queuing
files for anon-uucp, or mail to accounts that haven't been pre-arranged.
Maybe uunet could put up a kermit server login on the 900 number and
build in a little magic so a remote GET host:path would find anything
in the world.  For their subscribers, a mail server that only queued
for direct connections would work, or a uux'able command.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us