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From: eric@milo.UUCP (Eric Bergan)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: How robust will satellite distribution be?
Message-ID: <790@milo.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Dec-84 12:25:56 EST
Article-I.D.: milo.790
Posted: Mon Dec 24 12:25:56 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Dec-84 01:58:27 EST
References: <753@sdcsla.UUCP> <480@vortex.UUCP>
Organization: JHU/Applied Physics Lab, Laurel, MD
Lines: 23


	Given that there are now hundreds (thousands?) of news machines,
is it really reasonable to try and send "makeup" news whenever one of them
is down? Seems to me that at any given moment, there must be at least a
handful of news machines down. Perhaps a better solution is simply to
allow a machine that has been down to call a "news repository" via UUCP
and get the missing articles. Then the burden is placed on the system that
went down, not the satellite distribution. I suspect the result would be
that some sites would determine it is not important to get the missing
news, while others would be allowed to catch up if they wished.

	In either case, the software should be set up so that the site
administrator is presented a list of groups, and missing articles, so that
they can decide not to pick up the 1236 net.flame articles, but they do
want the 15 net.sources articles.

	Perhaps we should somehow design this to be at least partially
compatable with the "distributed news" effort? Seems there are some
common traits, albiet on different scales.

-- 
					eric
					...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!milo!eric