🚀 go-pugleaf

Jean Marie Diaz <ambar@athena.mit.edu> writes:

	... quite often these days, the ONLY way for me to get mail
	to a given machine on the west coast is to route through ucbvax:

		foo%decwrl.dec.com@ucbvax.berkeley.edu

	This isn't a matter of us not "knowing" decwrl -- the
	problem is that the net is so overloaded that we can't stay
	connected long enough to get a mail message through!

WHOA ... let's hold on there for a minute.  The reason that ucbvax
happens to have a good connection to decwrl is not because it's
"on the west coast" but rather that DEC pays for a dedicated PRIVATE
leased line between UCB and DEC ... normally sending mail to decwrl
via any other west coast ARPANET site will result in similar delays,
as decwrl.dec.com is on the NASA/Ames MILNET PSN, and is subject
to getting it's packets via an ARPANET/MILNET gateway ... in general,
routing through ucbvax is a bad idea ... especially for destinations
on MILNET, due to low processor bandwidth (it's a VAX-11/750 with
no cycles to spare).

Congestion on ARPANET is bad (MILNET sees much less congestion),
and the gateways are clearly overloaded, but let's not make things
worse by encouraging bad habits ...

/jordan