I forgot to  mention two other "design deadlines". These  have nothing to do
with human intervention, it's just a technical goal I would like to reach.
 
- Delay  between the  time a  DISTRIBUTE job  is posted  and the  time it  has
  reached 90%  of its  recipients, with  average network  load (around  500 on
  BITNIC -> EARNET and  100-200 on CEARN <-> DEARN): this  depends on the size
  of the  file of course, but  I would like this  to be one fifth  of the time
  SENDFILE  would take  on  the  same file  for  30  recipients. However,  the
  absolute deadline  should be  the time  SENDFILE would take.  This is  why I
  think it  is important  to have  the backbone servers  restarted in  case of
  failure.  And this  is why  I  cannot accept  nodes which  place the  server
  offline during peak hours, even if it is only 3 hours a day. Otherwise users
  will get nervous and will revert to SENDFILE :-(
 
- Time  required to  PUT a  (relatively  small) file  on 95%  of the  backbone
  servers, under  the same conditions as  above: 24 hours. List  owners should
  not have  to wait for  more than 24  hours to have  an update to  their list
  propagated to all the  peers. It should be possible to  remove a server from
  the backbone in about 1 day if it is scheduled to be down for some period of
  time.
 
  A NETSERV  PUT takes  about 2  hours to reach  all non-down  servers, except
  CANADA01 and TCSVM. It takes about  8 additional hours to reach those nodes.
  There are  much more LISTSERVs than  NETSERVs, so we cannot  expect the same
  speed, but 24 hours would seem to be quite feasible.
 
  The last time I distributed a small file (PROBLEMS MEMO), it had reached 75%
of its recipients in 12 minutes under  very good file queue conditions. And it
took about  3 hours to reach  all the nodes that  were not down for  the whole
weekend. But then  it took several days  to reach those few  nodes. That's why
I'm always speaking of 90% and suchlike.
 
  Eric