Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!uunet!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rutgers!phri!mcclb0!smith
From: smith@mcclb0.med.nyu.edu (Ross Smith: (212) 340-5356)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: Re: Distributing GenBank over the Internet
Message-ID: <573@mcclb0.med.nyu.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 89 13:50:40 GMT
References: <1989Dec7.213027.8591@phri.nyu.edu>
Organization: NYU Medical Center, New York, NY, USA
Lines: 23

In article <1989Dec7.213027.8591@phri.nyu.edu>, roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:

> 	Would it be possible to get rid of all this magtape and distribute
> GenBank over the Internet?  One possibility is being able to ftp the tar
> files.  Another more interesting possibility is using NNTP, or something
> like it.  

While this idea is not bad, I do not think that it is all that practical.  We
are at the end of a slow link and FTPing all or most of a GENBANK release,
appart from the system manager time taken up, would be horribly slow.
Distribution via NNTP may not be all that reliable and involve major manager
time committment to organize. 

We do not have this kind of time.  The 'system' we have here for dealing with
Genbank is essentially automatic. Once it has run successfully we have a
working COMPLETE bank.  I think that the increasing size of the bank is a
strong argument for KEEPING the tape distributions not abandoning them since
these tapes serve as complete 'backup' of the bank each quarter. 

Having GenBank available for FTP is very helpfull.  Having the updates
available inbetween releases is becomming more and more important.  But I
think it is a big mistake to think that the quarterly distribution of Genbank
via tape (1600/6250) can or should be abandoned any time soon.