Don't panic, the  NIC did not disable the DISTRIBUTE  function. However their
server has  a very old version  of PEERS NAMES  which does NOT list  the BITNIC
server (it  appears as NEWLIST@BITNIC).  When a  server finds itself  unable to
locate its own darn entry in PEERS  NAMES, it assumes that the other servers do
not know about it either (quite reasonable  I think). There can be two reasons:
 
1) The PEERS NAMES file  is too old. Anyway the other  servers would reject any
   inter-server DISTRIBUTE command  for security reasons since  they don't know
   about it. That's  like MAILER checking the RSCS tag  to validate the origin.
 
2) The site  has erased PEERS  NAMES because  the server is  local-only. That's
   how I  had first implemented  the "DISTRIBUTE command lockout"  feature. The
   normal way to disable  it now is to change your :release  entry from 1.nn to
   01.nn or 1.0nn (ie anything that will  be considered < 1.4 by REXX). Yet the
   old way still works.
 
All of this will  be fixed when a new copy of PEERS  NAMES has been received at
BITNIC and  CUNYVM. I sent  a recent  version to Ricky  on the day  the problem
occured but the  lines seem to have been  down for a while --  I'm just getting
plenty of mail from the US right now.  Maybe it's fixed by the time you receive
this but I wanted to explain the cause of the problem.
 
  Eric