🚀 go-pugleaf

FYI: We gained substantially on the CServe-bound mail queue over the
weekend.  Unfortunately, at the curent rate of gain, it would take a
week to clear completely.  So tomorrow morning, we're bringing up
SneakerNet: I'm going to dump a dd(1) tape of the current backlog and
drive it over to CServe, where my counterpart is going to inhale them
The Hard Way for delivery.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a
 station wagon loaded with magtapes."
	--Unknown, but possibly Bob Sutterfield (Bob?)

jpr@jpradley.jpr.com writes:
>  I dig it Karl, the overload problem is getting to you. So you post your
>  message to this group. How will anyone reading your wailings and flailings
>  help resolve the problems?  Have you sent this message to John James or Pete
>  Holsberg?

On the latter, yes, I have.  And I'll go check CServe's UNIX Forum in
about half an hour to see what's up.

On the former, I posted the note here both for the information content
so people know why things are delayed, as well as to editorialize on
the evils of MBASes.  As a result of the posting, I am informed in
private mail that
	[a] Uunet's mail servers will not respond to any but uunet
	    customers.
	[b] Brian Kantor & Co are working on a mail server which
	    will respond only if there is an IP addr for the origin;
	    or the address is local-to-UCSD-uucp-host!user; or the
	    address is uunet!one-machine-hop!user.
I find both of these to be done The Right Way.  I find
bitftp@pucc.princeton.edu to be done The Wrong Way.

(In fairness, I may be picking on Princeton too much.  When the queue
exploded 10 days ago, and we poked at things to learn what it was that
was happening to us, bitftp figured prominently.  I no longer know for
sure who all the guilty parties are.)

>  Who's sending multi-megabyte blortfuls? CIS mailboxes can conatain multi-
>  megabytes?

CServe subscriber mailboxes can contain up to 100 messages, each up to
50Kbytes.  Or so I was told last time I asked.  This doesn't prevent
people from _trying_ to send multi-megabyte blortfuls, with one of two
effects:
	[1] The recipient downloads/deletes things as fast as they
	    come in;
	[2] The excess stuff starts bouncing back at the originator
	    due to a "mailbox full" error.  (And yes, there are
	    glitches where it inadvertently returns to the From: on
	    this error rather than the Sender:.  CServe folk are aware
	    of the problem and will fix it eventually.)
Guess what the latter does to the gateway machine...

>  Path: jpradley!uupsi!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!cs.utexas.edu!
>	 tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!karl_kleinpaste

>  From your cis, you get to one of your Pyramids, and then the stuff
>  has to go via texas and california to get to another of your
>  Pyramids before moving on to Troy?

Zaphod is Dave Alden's Sun4 (SS1+, I believe) in Math.  It's currently
got a hammerlock on the #1 slot in the Top 1000 Influence List,
running 11 percentage points above uunet in news propagation.  I have
no affiliation with that machine, though we exchange a feed, and I'm
surprised that Tut didn't feed the article direct to Zaphod before
Fletcher et al got a hold of it.

--karl