Hello,
as a consequence of Jose Maria's bye bye a lot of subscribers were moved
in our beloved little world of Listservers, and probably more will
follow.
 
"Why this big hassle" you may ask. Please remember: Not that Jose has
left the net is the problem. The problem is that the EB0UB011 management
is now fully responsible for their Listserv and it's under their control.
Just try to imagine what could happen if your boss would run your Listserv.
If this makes no sense to you, you are an exception, congratulations on
such a boss.
It is not necessary to have worse phantasies about the EB0UB011 management,
the crucial point is that there is nobody who knows how to run such a heavily
peered Listserv as EB0UB011 is (was).
 
Therefore it seems a good idea to remove as much as possible of the list
traffic from this site (at least to Jose and me, I hope you share this
opinion).
 
To support this I'm installing nearly all of the EB0UB011 lists here (it's
much easier to scan the full list than to check for every list whether this
makes sense). Except for those which already exists here they are initially
empty. For some lists this should be useful because EB0UB011
was the only European peer, for some other lists DB0TUI11 (although not
ideal located) should be good supplement to FINHUTC for central Europe.
What will be needed are more peers in southern and western Europe.
I'm installing the lists to provide a last resort if there isn't a better
located site volunteering. Anyway, some of you may expect letters from
me asking for new peerings/removing of EB0UB011 peerings.
 
BTW, two ideas were refreshed by these actions:
 
- I see no sense for three distinct lists ASM370, VMKIDS-L, and IBM-MAIN.
  In theory (from the list description) it makes sense. But look at the
  practice. The questions and discussions are spread randomly over these
  lists. And how should somebody who has a question know in advance in
  which category it belongs, this would be half the solution in some cases :-)
  I suggest to replace the three lists by a new list: IBM-VM (never heard
  about MVS :-) , don't reply, I have an automatic nastygramm-discarder :-)
 
- Some of the EB0UB011 lists were 'fake' peer lists for Bitnic lists, grrr.
  Do we need BITNIC? Why not set up a real peer chain for at least some
  high traffic BITNIC lists, inform the BITNIC subscribers how to move
  to the peered network and show BITNIC the advantage of empty lists (which
  really don't need to be peered)?
 
Enough for now, I have already wasted enough time with this mess.
 
  Thomas
 
P.S.: You may argue that Jose Maria is responsible for this hassle due to
his very abrupt retirement from the net. I assume I had prepared such a crash
with my management better, so my colleagues would have no trouble but my
management would have a lot of head ache. But that's grey theory. You can't
plan every crash in detail in advance :-) I understand and respect Jose Maria,
otherwise I wouldn't care about these damned lists.
 
P.P.S.: If you have questions, please contact Eric or me. Of course if
your site is both in the middle of the USA and of Europe, and you are
willing to peer any lists which any mail junkie may install, and have
some disk space for the stuff from the EB0UB011 file server, you should
immediately post to this list :-)