From: utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!mcnc!trt Newsgroups: net.news,net.mail Title: Re: The USENET corporation, a whole new way to run usenet Article-I.D.: mcnc.1452 Posted: Thu Jan 6 13:18:39 1983 Received: Fri Jan 7 01:07:07 1983 References: crystal.149,watmath.4138 I have trouble with certain aspects of CSNET, and Marvin Solomon's recent article just troubles me more. Here are some random points. 1. "CSNET is like a uucp corporation plus more". Yeah, lots more. It does not run uucp, restricts relay sites to one of a select few, and provides only one service -- mail. 2. CSNET has a legitimate ARPA gateway. Yes, but I doubt much of the traffic through it meets the requirements stated in writing in the CSNET contract. Several Usenet (and many uucpnet) sites are on ARPA, but they are not permitted to function as gateways. Seems mostly political to me. 3. CSNET has automatic routing. No more a!b!c!d!person. That is something that should have been put into uucp years ago. Noone did. It is not easy. I suspect CSNET solves it by having only a few relay machines so routing can be via simple table lookup. This is probably the best feature of CSNET. 4. CSNET will soon have a name server. Wonderful! Something that should be put into uucp as well. 5. CSNET uses a better naming convention: 'person.site at relay-site'. No! CSNET has better routing. The syntax itself is lousy. More consistent would be 'person at site at relay-site', but that starts looking like uucp syntax, right? And of course ARPA cannot handle more than one at-sign. Presumably the newer 'person at domain1.domain2. ... .universe' syntax will supplant the older one (note there is still a single at-sign). None of this is compatible with uucp syntax, of course. 6. CSNET is responsive to its customers. I wonder. How many CSNET sites are also on Usenet? How may CSNET sites are also on ARPA? CSNET supplied a special mail sending/reading program which is incompatible with all other UNIX mail programs. Steve Bellovin did not like that so he modified Berkeley Mail to support CSNET. The resulting program is now shipped with new releases of CSNET software. Do any CSNET sites still use the CSNET-supplied mail program? CSNET does not permit a distributed bulletin board service (see below). CSNET does not support an integrated UNIX mail program. CSNET does not support file transfer. CSNET does not support an integrated UNIX-to-UNIX communication. This last part I *do* consider relevant. In this area we use uucp heavily for machine-machine communication both over phone lines and over hard wired lines. MMDF/Phonenet/Telenet cannot currently replace uucp for such things. So the CSNET software represents an additional burden placed on the system programmers. I would like to know why CSNET has such disregard for existing software. 7. The state of CSNET. How many CSNET sites are there? How many sites will be on CSNET by the end of 1983? How much has CSNET cost the taxpayers? How much will CSNET cost the taxpayers in 1983? How many letters has CSNET sent? How many letters will CSNET send in 1983? 8. "A mail network like [CSNET] is capable of supporting netnews on top of it without any special arrangements." No. *MANY* special arrangements are needed. For efficiency, a submitted article must be (encapsulated and) mailed to a mailing list (just like on ARPA!) so that the relay sites can efficiently distribute the articles. There could be a single 'net' mailing list in which case every site gets *all* net articles, or one mailing list per newsgroup, in which case adding new newsgroups becomes a tricky business. Incoming articles can be processed by 'recnews' or some other mail-to-article conversion program. Other arrangements are possible, such as CSNET providing a 'news server' at the relay sites. Fortunately, Usenet has a good track record of compensating for the inadequacies of other networks. Then there are the political and financial problems. I suspect this is more serious than what is implied by the quote below: "... For that reason, it is [currently] politically unacceptable to use CSNET for netnews. Once there is a billing procedure in place (not just phone bills, but also cycles on the relay, etc.), anybody who wants to pay for that ridiculous volume of junk will be welcome to do so." -- Marvin Solomon, July 1982 9. UUCP is really awful. It certainly is. And so are the various services that run on top of it. It is too bad that noone supports work on uucpnet/Usenet software. It is a shame that nothing in the foreseeable future is going to replace it. Tom Truscott (mcnc!rti!trt)