On Sat, 14  Mar 1992 08:48:58 CST  Natalie Maynor <[log in to unmask]>
said:
 
>This is a good reason NOT to tell the net about such equivalencies. When
>I found out that sometimes mail would be changed to my bitnet address if
>the equivalency  were registered, I  was very  happy that ours  isn't. I
>don't  want my  bitnet address  used --  EVER. It  can add  days to  the
>routing.
 
I'm sorry to have to say this, but your attitude is at best improductive.
Your  problem   is  that  your   BITNET  connection  is   not  performing
satisfactorily. The ideal solution is to make it perform to satisfaction.
Another solution is to declare it  devoid of end-user value and remove it
completely. Both of  these approaches make sense.  Advocating the secrecy
of BITNET<->Internet  address mapping  just because your  installation is
not willing to  take either action and it happens,  through a side effect
of a  common piece of  software, to cause  the same behaviour  as removal
from BITNET  (but without  requiring you  to justify  anything) is  not a
productive attitude. It is what I call  hiding one's head in the sand. It
may solve your own, personal problem,  but it does not help users without
BITNET access  who want to  know the hostname  of your machine,  or users
without Internet  access who only got  an Internet hostname. It  does not
help people who run the network in their troubleshooting.
 
>Since most lists have internet addresses also, I strongly recommend that
>subscribers use  their internet addresses  and forget the  list's bitnet
>address.
 
And when an end-user asks a LISTSERV  for a list about topic XYZ, what he
gets is a BITNET node name. If everyone did like you and made sure not to
register their Internet<->BITNET address mapping,  the user would have no
way to find out that UGA can be reached as UGA.CC.EDU, unless someone had
told him.
 
Furthermore, if  everyone, in addition  to removing the  registration for
their  Internet<->BITNET mapping,  also changed  all subscriptions  to an
Internet address form, the DISTRIBUTE protocol would be totally disabled.
There would  be only  Internet subscribers, all  routed through  the same
gateway at INTERBIT. All of a sudden, this one gateway (which is actually
spread  over  a handful  of  nodes)  would  have  to handle  hundreds  of
thousands of pieces of mail a day. What happens to the gateway? What does
the executive  director of  the computing centre  in question  decide the
very next day?
 
Mailing lists  can only exist  (on the BITNET  scale) through the  use of
DISTRIBUTE. To be effective, DISTRIBUTE requires either BITNET addresses,
Internet addresses with a known  mapping, or Internet addresses mapped to
a gateway serving a particular area, rather than acting as a gateway from
the whole BITNET  world to the whole Internet world.  DISTRIBUTE does not
provide optimal performance for each and  every posting to each and every
list. It only provides optimal performance for the network as a whole.
 
  Eric