I have remained silent on this topic because I have basically nothing much to say. I think EARN people should be treated like adults and allowed to run LISTEARN without getting bashed if that is what they want to do. On the other hand list owners should be treated like adults as well and allowed to unpeer their lists from LISTEARN servers without bashing, if they have a good reason to do so. With the exception of UKACRL, which is a very special case, I do not want to make any general statement regarding LISTSERV-LISTEARN peering as this would have the same effect as dumping a couple hundred gallons of gas on a bonfire; besides which, my knowledge of LISTEARN is derived solely from my subscription to a couple EARN working groups hosted on a LISTEARN server, ie I am not in any position to make qualified statements about the continued interoperability of list peering functions in the future. There is however one aspect of the problem on which I do not hesitate to state my opinion, and that is non-LISTEARN 1.5o servers. UPGRADE THEM ASAP! - 1.5o is not presently supported by anybody. - 1.5o crashes several times a day (assuming a typical backbone server workload). Sometimes it gets into a CPU loop. Sometimes it just gets an addressing exception. Sometimes it fills the spool with a console log. I have fixed a lot of such crashes and loops in 1.6, and I understand Turgut has done the same in LISTEARN. - 1.5o will crash if you feed it a "new format" BITEARN NODES file. So will 1.6e, but that will soon be fixed (I'll type another note on this topic after I'm done with this one). I assume LISTEARN will be fixed to support the new format as well. I am pretty sure nobody will modify 1.5o to understand the new format; when the old format becomes history, 1.5o sites will only be able to run on obsolete tables, and will insist that the closest VM-UTIL site to Christian is BITNIC :-) Here are some statistics on the release distribution of the current server population. The first table applies only to EARN servers, and shows that there are still SEVEN backbone servers running (non-LISTEARN) 1.5o. The second table applies to the whole network; the discrepancy in the number of "backbone" servers is due to different definitions, the first table assumes "backbone" = "DISTRIBUTE", the second one counts the ":backbone.YES" tags. Eric %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Received 49 answers out of the expected 49 (100%) (26 answers from backbone servers) +-------------------------+------------+-------------+ | Server type and version | Backbone | All servers | +-------------------------+------------+-------------+ | LISTEARN (all releases) | 8 (30.8%) | 21 (42.9%) | +-------------------------+------------+-------------+ | LISTSERV 1.6e | 11 (42.3%) | 18 (36.7%) | +-------------------------+------------+-------------+ | LISTSERV 1.5o | 7 (26.9%) | 9 (18.4%) | | Other 1.5 | - | 1 ( 2.0%) | | Total 1.5 | 7 (26.9%) | 10 (20.4%) | +-------------------------+------------+-------------+ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Version Non-EARN EARN (1.6) LISTEARN Total ------- -------- ---------- -------- --------- 1.6e 165 (90%) 17 - 182 (77%) 1.6d 12 ( 7%) - - 12 ( 5%) 1.6c 1 ( 1%) - - 1 ( 0%) 1.6a 2 ( 1%) - - 2 ( 1%) 1.5o 2 ( 1%) - 34 (94%) 36 (15%) 1.5n 1 ( 1%) - 2 ( 6%) 3 ( 1%) 1.5i 1 ( 1%) - - 1 ( 0%) Total 184 (78%) 17 ( 7%) 36 (15%) 237 Backbone 98 (53%) 13 (76%) 17 (47%) 128 (54%)