I have been fighting this issue with EARN-Spain on internal EARN lists
for a while, with little success so far. The only feedback I ever got was
the usual complaint about not having reported the problem through the
proper channels, ie privately to postmaster@esgbox (which Aldo had done,
in Spanish and very politely in spite of 3 weekdays without a single
message, but for some reason nobody ever answered), along with some
background information, a statement that such complaints are very harmful
and that their authors might be personally responsible for causing the
death of EARN-Spain if they don't stop, and no concrete commitment or
promise to address the problem. Having been involved with EARN for over 8
years now, I was neither surprised nor worried at this reaction. Spain
and some other countries have shown this kind of unresponsiveness in the
past and the only consequence is that a lot of people have to waste a lot
of time before the problem can be solved, but it gets solved all the
same.
The root of the problem is that ESGBOX is an underpowered, unreliable
system running obsolete software and not monitored the way such a
problem-prone setup would need to be monitored. Because it runs JNET V3.4
it does not support multi-streaming and there are often queues of
thousands of files between ESGBOX and the national node. Sometimes the
box starts rejecting all incoming messages with "No such local user
SMTPUSER" and production traffic is lost. This goes on for several days,
so the machine is clearly not monitored on a daily basis. There is a free
and working alternative called INTERBIT, but for one reason or another
EARN-Spain refuses to take the service off ESGBOX, and there is no
authority that can force EARN-Spain to switch to INTERBIT. Which of
course doesn't mean LISTSERV has to route the messages as EARN-Spain
wants. EARN-Spain only represents a small minority of LISTSERV users, who
I am sure would agree that a working gateway is better than lost mail if
one were to ask them directly :-)
Unfortunately until the CREN/L-Soft agreement and the 145 Member
licensing agreements are signed, most of the world will be running 1.7f
on which I can't update DOMAIN NAMES to make LISTSERV use INTERBIT for
.ES. Fortunately there is LINKSWT2 FILE which, together with the removal
of all Spanish LISTSERVs from the backbone, would allow me to cause
traffic to .ES to go somewhere else, where a local override can point it
to a working gateway. From then on it shouldn't take more than a month
for EARN-Spain to write an infuriated letter making me personally
responsible for all the problems ever to arise in this world, including
the decision by the university that ran ESGBOX to stop providing this
service free of charge, at which point they will have no choice but to
accept to change DOMAIN NAMES to point .ES to INTERBIT at a significant
loss of functionality to Spanish users :-)
I expect to activate this rerouting within a couple weeks, as SEARN can't
handle any extra traffic and I'm still waiting for JNET for the AXP
3000-600 which will take over its SMTP function.
Eric
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