On Fri, 1 Mar 1996 08:59:52 CST Jon Eidson <[log in to unmask]>
said:
>With CREN announcing the passing of bitnet-nje, I was wondering if any
>of the bitnet gurus might give all the configuration changes required
>for us old bitnet folks to go 100% internet. While I know some of the
>areas that need changing, I thought it might be nice to get it directly
>from "the horses mouth" so to speak ;-)
>
>There might be some considerations that I'm not aware of.
>
>Eric?
Well, I've been away for 2 weeks and had 7,872 messages when I came back,
many of which I haven't read yet, so I may not have seen all the relevant
discussion. One thing I do know though is that I and the other core site
managers learned about that decision through comments made by people on
this and other public lists, to which we happened to be subscribed. I'm
not trying to waste everybody's time on a silly finger pointing exercise,
I'm just trying to give you an idea of the amount of planning and
technical review that went into this decision, and to point out that I
don't know anything about this decision that Joe Q. Postmaster doesn't
:-) We were all taken by surprise.
As far as L-Soft and LISTSERV are concerned, this shouldn't create any
problem. We've had the tools to run LISTSERV without BITNET for 2 years
now. I know that some sites have had trouble convincing their management
that the TCP/IP versions of LISTSERV actually work, but hopefully this
should be a non-issue nowadays. Most LISTSERV sites run on non-VM
systems, which are definitely not connected to BITNET :-) Obviously
finding the $$$ to buy the necessary software upgrade can be a problem,
but on the other hand I expect most BITNET sites to drop their CREN
membership when they leave BITNET, which will release funds that were
already budgeted. In the past, LISTSERV-TCP/IP migration costs have only
been an issue for a very small number of sites.
As far as BITNET is concerned, while there is clearly a risk of seeing a
messy and uncoordinated shutdown, as Ulrich said it would be premature to
draw final conclusions. The vital BITNET coordination functions are
actually provided by a small group of people, currently organized under
the GUMNCC umbrella. The GUMNCC is a Terena operational task force, or
whatever the official buzzword is (Terena is the organization resulting
from the merger of EARN and RARE). CREN pays Terena/GUMNCC for its share
of this service, but the money can be found elsewhere. As CREN gets out
of the NJE business, I expect that Terena and the GUMNCC will begin
offering NJE connectivity directly to US organizations. If for whatever
reason Terena decides to shut down BITNET in Europe as well, the handful
of people that make up the GUMNCC can simply reorganize themselves
differently and provide the service anyway. All that is needed is a
billing entity, and any of the GUMNCC people's employers could arrange
that easily (assuming they want to, which is another matter, but it's not
like a simple billing issue is going to stand in the way of keeping
BITNET alive for people who still need it). On top of that, it would
probably be a lot cheaper than people are currently paying for BITNET
access. I hesitate to give figures that I know someone will later quote
against me :-), but I imagine that $500/year for one node and $1k/year
for 2-10 nodes would be sufficient to recover costs even if a lot of
sites were to leave. I don't think anyone in the US is paying less than
that currently.
I know that this was already tried in the past without success, but at
the time there was a rigid political infrastructure that just got in the
way. There were relationships to be preserved, and the newly formed
Terena organization was trying to organize itself and define chains of
command, etc. Terena's management ended up deciding against the proposal,
and Terena was employing most of the people in the GUMNCC, so they had to
do as Terena said. As you may know, these people were later laid off :-(,
but the upside is that the current GUMNCC is free from any such influence
:-) So I am confident that this problem can be solved. On the other hand,
nothing ever happens overnight with Terena, so we'll have to be patient.
Eric
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