Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ncrcan!ontenv!soley
From: soley@ontenv.UUCP (Norman S. Soley)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Security Mailing List Still out there?
Message-ID: <869@ontenv.UUCP>
Date: 15 Oct 88 16:56:46 GMT
References: <398@island.uu.net> <5093@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Organization: Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Toronto
Lines: 35

In article <5093@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>, spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford) writes:
> 
> The question: why is the security mailing list dormant, and how long
> will it stay that way?
> 
> Answer: it is dormant because it grew so large that no site can be found
> where they are willing to host the mailing list -- sending out many
> hundreds of mail messages at once is quite a load on many mailers.
> 
> The obvious question is, why not turn it into a newsgroup?  Because the
> moderator doesn't want to broadcast the contents, including hole
> information.  The list was assembled with some small care that only
> sysadmins at well-known sites would be included in the list.
> 
> If anyone is willing to host the mailing list at their site, please
> send mail to Andrew Burt -- he'd love to hear from you.

A technique I've seen used effectively to deal with very large
mailling lists is the use of regional 'expanders'. 

Essentially the moderator keeps a meta-list of aliases on a dozen or
so machines which each have a chunk of the real list for their
respective geographic area. 

It's a lot more work for the moderator and the regional expander
sysadmins need to be trusted types, both to keep undesireables from
reading the list and to put the work in to keep the whole thing from
crashing down. But if machine resources are the only problem...



-- 
Norman Soley - Data Communications Analyst - Ontario Ministry of the Environment
UUCP:	uunet!attcan!lsuc!ncrcan!ontenv!soley	VOICE:	+1 416 323 2623
OR:     soley@ontenv.UUCP