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From: dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman)
Newsgroups: tor.news
Subject: Re: lsuc UUCP & news report
Message-ID: <1462@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Dec-86 15:42:44 EST
Article-I.D.: lsuc.1462
Posted: Wed Dec 17 15:42:44 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Dec-86 22:03:58 EST
References: <1441@lsuc.UUCP> <7410@utzoo.UUCP> <136@methods.UUCP>
Reply-To: dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman)
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 85
Summary: have I created a monster?

peter@methods.UUCP (Peter Blake) writes:
>	1) Who's going to read those reports after the novelty
>	   wears off?  (Let's face it they are not exciting).

Putting them in a group which no-one needs to read but which
quietly maintains current information can, I think, be useful.
Anytime you have a problem, you can take a peek into tor.news.stats
for the right information. Better yet, if you want to check whether
uucp between some pair of sites is current, you can get this information
too (not "current" in the sense of "is it supposed to work",
as you can get from mod.map, but "current" in the sense of
"did it work yesterday").

>	2) How are we going to recognize subtle flow problems?
>	   Not every news administrator is going to scrutanize
>	   the reports even from his/her own machine. (Its that
>	   boredom factor again).

Agreed. What it's for is when you suddenly get the feeling
that nothing's coming in, and you wonder where the problem is.
Of course, the traditional way is to mail everyone upstream
from you to figure out who's stopped sending. Maybe that's
good enough. If one of those MAIL routes is down, though,
it might not be.

Perhaps all this is unnecessary after all. Maybe the old,
casual way is fine. I'm willing to give the stats method
a chance, though. If they're in a .stats group that nobody
needs to read, and they take up only local phone calls and
a tiny fraction of total net traffic, they needn't bother anyone.

>	3) How do we fix the problems?
>
>I believe that we really need to consider writing some cute code that
>will perform report/statistical analysis and inform us when a flow problem
>does exist.  But before we all put our super-programming hats on and
>consome mass quanitites of extra-strong-programmers-coffee, I suggest that
>we, as a community, consider what we want to gain from such a tool(s)
>and how are we going to implement it (it is no good if only a few of
>us abide by the "rules").
>
>Two goals that I think we would all like to see are:
>
>	1) Quick and accurate flow problem detection and analysis.
>	   Not only should problems be detected, a solution should
>	   be suggested to correct the problem.  A relatively
>	   inexperienced news admin, like myself, are sometimes quite
>	   overwhelmed and appreciate suggestions and advice.
>	   (For you universities playing with expert systems, why
>	    not consider doing something for news administration).

Fascinating idea.

>
>	2) Relief from manually monitoring the news.  (My overall
>	   goal is to get the system to monitor itself and only
>	   bother me when there is a problem it can't handle - can
>	   you say lazy, I knew you could).

Of course, if you read news daily or so, you'll see the problems
yourself. But sure, wanna write a shell script which examines
your scanlog output daily and mails you if articles received
are too low? That's easy. How about one which examines all
articles in tor.news.stats daily and posts something (from 1
site only!) to tor.news indicating where the flow problems are?!
This could get to be fun.

>How do the rest of you all feel?  I realize that what I am suggesting
>will amount to a lot of effort; however, I believe that such effort
>will reap its own rewards.

Yep. The old problem of "I don't have the time - you do it if
you want it". Well, if someone wants to write a script based on
the algorithm I described above, we can build on it as a community.

Better, of course, would be something tied into the netnews
software in the form of a control message, "tell me how many
articles you received today". That combined with a central
database of everyone's sys file could produce a netwide
summary, posted daily, of where links seem to be down. Aren't
computers wonderful? :-(

David Sherman
-- 
{ ihnp4!utzoo  seismo!mnetor  utai  watmath  decvax!utcsri  } !lsuc!dave