Date: Wed, 31 May 1995 11:10:40 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Cc: jmb@kryten.atinc.com, hsu@freefall.cdrom.com, jfieber@cs.smith.edu, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: mailing lists Message-ID: <199505311610.LAA00176@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <9505302030.AA11943@cs.weber.edu> from "Terry Lambert" at May 30, 95 02:30:46 pm
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> On the other hand, Linux currently runs a private newsgroup heirarchy > for their lists (instead of mailing them) and it's possible that that > would be a better soloution at this level of complexity. This could be an ideal distribution medium between "distribution points": nntplinks are trivial to set up, and the flood fill paradigm tends to ensure that a message will reach all points as soon as possible. Note that I am advocating using this as a _distribution_ medium. I am not advocating making all the mailing lists available via Usenet (although I would _also_ like to see this), nor am I advocating the retirement of the mailing lists. I am purely suggesting an efficient, more reliable "backbone" distribution method that would provide a foundation for a very resilient, very fast distributed mail list system. Before people start bitching about "Usenet delays" and crud, let me point out that it is quite possible to run a "mini-feed" that would handle *ONLY* FreeBSD list traffic (probably on top of some large news server). This could be quite efficient. Small example: you have three distribution sites in the U.S. Maybe cdrom.com, mu.edu, and xyz.org. Each of these sites configures their news servers to handle an additional "freebsd.*" hierarchy. Each of them opens an nntplink to the other two, feeding JUST this hierarchy. Now, two of the sites also nntplink to the regional exploder in England, two nntplink to the regional exploder in Germany, and two nntplink to Japan. Japan and England nntplink, Japan and Russia link, and Germany and Russia link. (I think that makes everybody with redundant connections, if not, keep going until it is so). All links are two-way. Real world solution is obviously somewhat larger in scale. Each Usenet spool pulls messages from the Usenet groups, and forwards it to the local mail hub (maybe the same machine), which then proceeds to mail it to the regional members of the group. Now, the Usenet groups would be private - they would be purely for intersite transit, to assure redundancy. You can get rid of all the news<->mail gateway assumptions by doing this (encapsulate the mail messages, perhaps even uuencode, to deter folks from trying to "use" the groups). This is a nifty way to propagate messages. If there is sufficient interest in doing something like this (it would not be too difficult, technically), I would be interested in setting up and staging a proof-of-concept demo. I have control over two news servers, and presumably we could get cdrom.com to participate.. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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