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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cuae2!gatech!lll-lcc!pyramid!ucat!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b,news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Database of all net sites
Message-ID: <882@epimass.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Feb-87 16:45:28 EST
Article-I.D.: epimass.882
Posted: Tue Feb 10 16:45:28 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Feb-87 20:31:30 EST
References: <110@catsim.catsim.UUCP> <7960@decwrl.DEC.COM> <3339@cbosgd.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.UUCP (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 37
Keywords: netsites, Database
Xref: watmath news.admin:137 news.software.b:248 news.sysadmin:38

In article <3339@cbosgd.ATT.COM> mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes:
>In December, I warned the net that these files (especially *.a.*)
>would be going away, and that people should save copies if they really
>want such information.  If you treasure lists of people that aren't any
>of your business, you might as well save the whole map.  But there is
>certainly no plan to make it harder to find a particular company by
>looking at the map; in fact, this will be easier since domains are based
>on organizations.

I'm not interested in finding companies.  I'm interested in talking
to news administrators, especially when they botch something and
screw up the network.  This happened dozens of times during the Great
Net Renaming, and will continue to happen.  It's less embarassing to
the guilty party to have things resolved in a phone call than to be
flamed all over the net because no one knows how to reach him or her.

I agree that a complete UUCP map for the purposes of mail is
unnecessary.  However, a Usenet map, providing a subset of the
information currently in mod.map, is necessary.  Such a map is a
useful tool in maintaining the network and saving costs (by using
information in the map, site administrators in the Bay Area have come
up with ways to rearrange their news feeds to save money in the
past).

If the map is too large to handle on a national basis, perhaps
portions of it can be dealt with on a regional basis (ba.map, ne.map,
etc).

Information about network connectivity is NOT "none of our business",
because it affects the external community.  Sites with the line-eater
bug screw up the whole net, not just other sites in their own
company, unless they are leaf nodes.  By the same logic, the
"sendsys" control message should be removed.  

-- 
- Joe Buck 	{hplabs,ihnp4,sun,ames}!oliveb!epimass!jbuck	HASA (A,S)
  Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, California