Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!eplrx7!lad From: lad@eplrx7.UUCP (Lawrence Dziegielewski) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: UUNET unreliability Message-ID: <561@eplrx7.UUCP> Date: 17 Dec 87 19:31:46 GMT Organization: E.I. DuPont Co. Engineering Physics Lab Lines: 44 For all those on the net who subscribe to uunet; has uunet been unreliable lately? I administer the news feed here at DuPont and when uunet became available I immiediately signed up. The idea of having a 'highly reliable' connection to a dedicated news/mail server appealed to me. And paying a $3.00 connect charge over Tymnet seemed a helluva lot cheaper than making long-distance phone calls to Arlington, VA (dgis, my old news feed). So what happened? Over the period of the last several weeks I have noticed that when calling the uunet machine in the 1-3AM time frame daily I have about a 15% chance of getting a connect. What I usually have to do after that is spend about 20-30 minutes in the morning calling uunet with uucico in debug mode (so I can see what's going on) to get a connect and get the news/mail. Then, of course, uunet goes down at 10AM (presumably for backups) and rarely comes back online before 1PM. I am writing this note just minutes after trying to connect to uunet again and getting no answer from their modems (it's 2:30PM EST). What gives? The end result of all of this is I now pay $600.-$700./month for news when my initial uunet bills were in the $150.-$300. range. I use tymnet after hours and the 800 line during peak times. I'd just liek to get back to paying less and getting the reliable connection I had when I first got on uunet. I even bought a Traliblazer modem to further reduce my online time (and charges) but after three weeks of begging for help to get it running, I'm giving up. I have not been able to get a reliable connection to uunet with it and several pleas for help to uunet!postmaster only got a set of instructions to connect to uunet by mail. In closing, I don't mean this to be an attack on the uunet machine and the people who run it. Honest. I just want a reliable machine to call, that's all. I know I could just go back to dialing another machine long-distance, but that's not going to solve the problems. I also know that I can't be the only machine in the world that's having trouble. I would like to hear from others regarding their expirences with uunet. Thanks, -- Lawrence A. Dziegielewski | E.I. Dupont Co. {uunet!dgis!psuvax1}!eplrx7!lad | Engineering Physics Lab Cash-We-Serve 76127,104 | Wilmington, Delaware 19898 MABELL: (302) 695-1311 | Mail Stop: E357-318