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From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: Formalizing rules (Really the relevancy of the backbone)
Message-ID: <571@fig.bbn.com>
Date: 31 Mar 88 21:00:28 GMT
References: <61@ncar.ucar.edu> <47325@sun.uucp> <68@ncar.ucar.edu> <47472@sun.uucp> <5864@swan.ulowell.edu> <77@ncar.ucar.edu>
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Bob Page:
=Anyway, the backbone can up and die for all the net cares.  It just
=means people will have to make decisions (or not) for themselves

Greg Woods:
=  Yeah, AND they have to find some new sites willing to foot the phone
=bills/CPU cycles/disk space to transmit everything. The result of that
=is that there is still a backbone, it's just a different group of sites.

I checked out Gene Spafford's latest "What's the Backbone" article.  Greg
metions the three three primary criteria for backboneage:  phone bills,
CPU, and disk space.  Just how relevant are these things, in these days of
easy-access networks (such as NSFNET) and NNTP?  I'm not sure, but I tried
an interesting experiment:  I tried to connect to the NNTP port on as many
of the US machines on Gene's backbone map as I could.  Here's what I got:

ARPA/Internet sites I could successfully connect to for NNTP
	ames
	cmcl2
	decvax
	gatech
	hao
	hplabs
	husc6
	mcnc
	mit-eddie
	rutgers
	ucbvax
	ucsd
	uunet
	uw-beaver
ARPA/Internet sites where a connection to port 119 was refused:
	bellcore
	decwrl
	ukma	(map shows news uunet link)
Sites that are apparently only UUCP:
	amdahl	(map shows news uunet link)
	clyde
	ihnp4
	linus
	nbires	(map shows uunet mail link)
	philabs	(map shows uunet mail link)
	tektronix
	ulysses
Sites known to be dead as of right now:
	cbosgd (presumably cb-att is filling this spot right now, but
		lots of folks fled when cbosgd died...)
	cae780

There are definitely some things wrong with my simplistic analysis.  For
example, I didn't post a sendsys to the sites involved  (I suppose I
could, via NNTP, but I'm about to leave for the day :-), so I don't know
how much time, money, and cycles are spent in the old-fashioned
UUCP/phonecall/compress method of transmitting netnews.  I'm also
completely wrong ignoring conventional UUCP email traffic.

Still and all, the above list make me draw some conclusions that I really
and honestly don't like.  In increasing order of my dislike, they are:

    The growth of the Internet, in particular the massive explosion of the
    NSFNET, and the astounding success of UUNET have drastically changed
    the structure of Usenet.

    The avowed concern of the backbone for "time, money, cycles, and
    space" is -- for the majority of sites -- not really an issue for
    them; the continual restatement now feels to me like paternalism.

    Without some re-evaluation of its nature, goals, and priorities
    the "backbone" is doomed to become as relevant to Usenet, as
    the appendix is to digestion.

	/r$
-- 
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net.