On Sun, 15 Mar 1992 13:02:39 EST Jerry B Altzman <JAUUS@CUVMB> said: >This is all very well and good, but for those of us who for some reason >*DON'T* want to be backbone servers (e.g. our bosses think that LISTSERV >eats up too much CPU/Disk space to begin with) it is highly annoying >when one of our downstream (read: leaf) sites claims that THEY are on >the backbone. Then all of our LISTSERV mail makes the hop from our >machine, to theirs, back to ours... I am not sure I understand the situation that you are describing. Surely mail to whatever lists of local users you might have isn't going to get sent to another machine and back, backbone or not. You must be talking about the mailing-list traffic sent to your local users by upstream lists. If your upstream node is not on the backbone either, you will indeed be served by a downstream node, which becomes topologically closer. This is unfortunate, but I am afraid I don't quite understand your attitude. If you don't run LISTSERV and want to play with mailing lists, you have to rely on the services offered by LISTSERV sites. You may not like the service you are getting, but you are free to run your own LISTSERV. Similarly, if you don't run a backbone LISTSERV, you have to rely on the services offered by backbone LISTSERV sites; same comment applies. There are things that can be done to make the files flow the way they used to. Suggesting that nodes downstream Columbia University should not join the backbone because Columbia University does not wish to join the backbone is not one of them. In fact, it does not make me eager to spend my time helping you solve this problem. Eric