Xref: utzoo news.misc:1491 news.config:640 Path: utzoo!linus!husc6!cmcl2!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: news.misc,news.config Subject: Re: The USENET Backbone (Updated: 17 May 1988) Summary: Some backbone links appear to be bogus Message-ID: <3283@phri.UUCP> Date: 25 May 88 03:33:48 GMT References: <4118@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY) Lines: 52 spaf@cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford) writes: > husc6 > | [If condensing somebody's words is paraphrasing, > philabs---cmcl2 does this constitute paragraphing?] > \ > rutgers Our main feed is cmcl2. I did some stats on the paths of the articles we had laying around in our /usr/spool/news. Out of 14007 files (not articles; no attempt was made to only count cross-posted articles once) I got 13834 paths coming directly from cmcl2. Of those paths, here's the breakdown by third site: 8006 nrl-cmf 4148 husc6 559 brl-adm 553 rutgers 274 beta 262 yale 11 arizona 5 vx2 5 acf8 4 acf5 2 esquire 2 acf3 1 polyof 1 kaplan 1 acf2 While I'm willing to believe that the majority of the traffic over the philabs link might be in cmcl2->philabs direction for some reason, I find it amazing that not a single article came the other way. Also, it seems that the vast majority of the articles reaching cmcl2 come from nrl-cmf, a link which doesn't show up at all. OK, I can understand that maybe nrl-cmf doesn't want to be listed in the backbone map. But, when two of the three official backbone links only supply a total of 4% of the incoming news flow, and all three only add up to about 30%, the only assumption I can come to is that something is wrong. If my observations for my local bit of the net hold true all over then I must conclude that the backbone map, while pretty to look at, really isn't worth much. It would be interesting if some other folks in different parts of the net ran the same kind of stats (doesn't take much more than some egreps, seds, sorts, and uniq's, and a bunch of CPU time) and posted the results. -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net