Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!unisoft!gethen!bdt!david From: david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: The death of USENET Message-ID: <329@bdt.UUCP> Date: 14 Jun 88 20:06:16 GMT References: <7475@swan.ulowell.edu> <2645@rpp386.UUCP> Reply-To: david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) Organization: Beckemeyer Development Tools, Oakland, CA Lines: 52 Being the admin of a simple leaf of a leaf of a leaf site, I usually don't participate in these conversations, but I couldn't resist this time. It's clear that anything you say in this group is going to get flamed, so I'm not even going to put in one of those "please don't flame me..." lines. I've been reading USENET for a long time, but I've only been running a node for about 6 months. I realize that my tiny site has little in common with the big boys, but I'm going to inject my point of view anyway. There's been a lot of talk about freeloaders. And at this time, I feel I'm a freeloader, but not by design. I run a little 286 UNIX box with 2MB RAM and 32MB dedicated to news; we get a partial feed, a few hops from a backbone. Our machine is taxed to just chew on the news we get, but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to feed others or do my part forwarding mail. But it doesn't work that way. Nobody wants a partial feed, at 2400bps, from a tiny leaf site. And who wants to route mail through that type of node either? Everybody wants a full feed at 9600 bps directly from the nearest backbone site. What I'm trying to say (rather poorly I suppose), is that, is it possbile for smaller sites (like mine) to relieve any of the burden from the medium sized and larger sites? I'm willing to use all the resources I can spare and I believe other sites may be willing to allocate more resources than they do now. I'm not saying that sites that are already over-loaded should do more; and I know that a crumby little 286 is not going to do much, but I'm willing to do my best with what I have. I have a small company (read myself and my wife part-time) but I don't want to be a freeloader becuase I find USENET valuable and I don't want to contribute to its death if I can help it. It seems like if the load can be better distributed, there are resources out there to handle it. One problem now appears that too much is centralized at too few sites. I may be naive, but I'm guessing that there are sites that are willing to contribute more of their resources, within their budgets. I know there are no controlling bodies, but what if we polled for information from site admins regarding what resources they are willing to expend (e.g. how many long distance feeds, or mail routing links). Then take that pool of resources and rearrange links to lighten the load on the over-burdened sites and pass it to other sites with some resources to spare. There's always going to be intentional freeloading without "official" control, but I still believe that there are a lot of "unintentional" freeloaders like me out there that may be able to help the problem. -- David Beckemeyer (david@bdt.uucp) | "Yea I've got medicine..." as the Beckemeyer Development Tools | cookie cocks a his Colt, "and if 478 Santa Clara Ave, Oakland, CA 94610 | you don't keep your mouth shut, I'm UUCP: {unisoft,sun}!hoptoad!bdt!david | gonna give you a big dose of it!"