Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> writes:
> Fortunately, this is true only in theory, and due to the extreme inertia
> of the BITNET board in this respect. This made sense in 1985, when more
> than 50% of the BITNET traffic had to go through an ever-backlogged 9.6k
> link, but that was a long time ago. There is some hope for a change in
> the foreseeable future, though: CREN has financed the development of a
> BITNET user's guide for VMS, and the resulting file is already larger
> than the holy 300k. For now the official line is that one will have to
> use FTP if one wants the BITNET user's guide in a single piece, but the
> obvious ridiculousness of this argument seems to have had some impact. I
> have no idea what will be decided nor when, but I assume the board will
> want to avoid having to tell users that they should connect to the
> Internet so they can be allowed to legally get a copy of the BITNET
> user's guide :-)
[While I am on one of the committees that is studying the issue, please
accept these comments as my own personal opinion, and not that of CREN or
anybody else]
This has been a problem for some time. BITEARN NODES and several monthly
update files have exceeded the size limit for some time now. There are some
sites that will hold a file if it is 300,001 bytes long (actually, they
usually count records, which is less accurate), while some other sites will
pass along files that are many megabytes in size. Neither policy is helping
the network.
When I raised the issue of the file size limit about 2 years ago, I was
told that in some other countries high-speed links are limited to slow speeds
or may be unreliable, causing serious problems with large files. I was also
told that increasing the file size limit would introduce unplanned-for growth
in usage on some international links which would be very expensive to upgrade.
It is my opinion that whatever size limit is agreed on should be a network-
wide limit, so the sender of a file will not have to consider his country's
rules, the destination country's rules, and the rules of any transit country.
Note that "country" could be changed to "organization" or some other entity
as well - I just chose country as an easy example.
However, this sort of network-wide decision will require input and a wil-
lingness to compromise by all parties - it doesn't seem realistic for coun-
tries with large bandwidth to dictate rules for others who don't have that
amount of bandwidth available. My impression is that we have the platform to
discuss this at this point (which we didn't have in the past) and I think
that there will be results forthcoming.
I don't think those results will arrive as fast as you or I as individuals
would like, but since it requires the cooperation of all the cooperating net-
works, I believe the changes will happen as soon as they can. Of course there
are meeting schedules and approvals to accomplish, but I think that's better
than the discord that would result if one country said "Ok. The file size lim-
it is now X megabytes" and started sending files of that size without giving
consideration to what's at the other end of the link.
Further, I'm optimistic that a decision _will_ be made, as I believe that
the major link sites are now manually releasing files when the link is idle,
and a clear new policy would save a lot of unnecessary labor.
Terry Kennedy Operations Manager, Academic Computing
[log in to unmask] St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
[log in to unmask] +1 201 915 9381
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