Xref: utzoo news.groups:3167 news.admin:1889 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!nrl-cmf!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin Subject: Re: Formalizing rules (Really the relevancy of the backbone) Message-ID: <8776@g.ms.uky.edu> Date: 2 Apr 88 05:44:41 GMT References: <61@ncar.ucar.edu> <47325@sun.uucp> <68@ncar.ucar.edu> <47472@sun.uucp> <5864@swan.ulowell.edu> <77@ncar.ucar.edu> <571@fig.bbn.com> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Distribution: na Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 66 In article <571@fig.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes: >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 where a connection to port 119 was refused: ... > ukma (map shows news uunet link) A small piece of information for you. You probably tried to connect to "a.ms.uky.edu" because of the alias "ukma = a.ms.uky.edu" in our map entry. What you don't know is that our NNTP server is run from an entirely seperate machine -- e.ms.uky.edu. Our news is physically stored on "e" with "a" being used as the interface to BITNET, and "g" being used as the interface to UUCP. (except the uucp software on "g" thinks that its name is "ukma" ... software is such fun :-) ... ). > 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. I know that we would never have been able to become part of the backbone if it weren't for NSFNET. Before NSFNET we were limping along on a pair of news feeds over BITNET (one which was from an IBM machine and all the articles we receive from there get horribly munged), plus one or two partial feeds with UUCP. As much as our phone budget could afford. It was a bad time. I agree with you. NSFnet has created at least one backbone site. > 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. My time is important. The more time I spend administering news the less time I have to do other things which are in reality very important. My time does cost the school some money. "e" gets slow whenever we get 3-4 NNTP connections running at a time. we've got a 100+ meg partition for news. nothing to sneeze at. I'd say that all those things are important to this place. Or were you implying that those things aren't important for most sites, but are for sites that have lots of feeds? That's probably true. One of the important duties for sites that have lots of feeds is to streamline and the software. It *is* important here that the software be more efficient (the constant exec'ing of rnews from nntpd is a killer) at this site and surely at others. > 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. Occasional re-evaluation is good for the soul. > /r$ -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- or: {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- <---- I don't have a Blue bone in my body!