The explanation is simple:
1. UCHCECVM installs LISTSERV. Their server appears to be working
perfectly.
2. They send me mail explaining that they are the central node of Chile
and would like to join the backbone. This sounds quite reasonable to
me, and, although they only recently installed the code, the
maintainer seems to be quite competent (from what I can gather). At
least, he seems proficient with REXX and assembler, which is
unfortunately not always the case, and sounds like he has several
years of experience with VM. So, I add them to the backbone.
3. For some reason, I had sort of implicitly assumed that Chile was
connected to Mexico. It never occured to me that they could have a
direct line to the States, and that putting them on the backbone would
therefore cause US stuff to go through them (the Mexico LISTSERV was
already on the backbone, so I figured it wouldn't change anything).
4. Gonzalo contacted me to say that he was suddenly having serious
problems with LISTSERV, and wanted to be removed from the backbone.
This was something that I couldn't do in less than one week or so,
since the CEARN-MOP queue was around 2500 (this was the famous week
where FRMOP22 was down 37.7% of the time). Remember that PEERS NAMES
is > 1700 records. Gonzalo's problem was that, apparently, files
coming from RSCSV2 (his network RSCS) were processed with an origin of
'RSCSV2@UCHCECVM', which caused of course some problems. To avoid a
possible loss of mail files, he decided to stop LISTSERV until the
problem was solved. However I didn't get all this information at once,
it took me several questions-and-answers to understand the nature of
the problem. To me it looked like his LISTSERV had been configured
with the wrong RSCS userid, which ought to take some 30 seconds to
fix. During this time, Gonzalo made traces over traces of the REXX and
assembler code, in an attempt to determine why it was not working.
From what I understand they were running a non-Crosswell mailer which was
retagging the output files (and/or using diag X'D4' to change their
origin?), and for some mysterious reason it did not cause any problem at
the beginning.
In any case this was all my fault, not Gonzalo's. I should have seen that
Chile was connected to the States, and changed the weights before adding
them to the backbone. Gonzalo did his best to prevent the loss of mail
files, which meant taking LISTSERV down for a while and spending as much
time as he could tracking down the problem.
Eric
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