Well Andy, I won't give you any B.S. but I will however remind you that you
are part of the NIC and that, as such, you are in an excellent position to
give a phone call to the offending TECHREP's, notify them of the obsoleteness
of their BITEARN NODES and help them to understand how to update it or obtain
a more recent copy. Since LISTSERV (1.6) is sending a mail message to these
people every day to remind them that they're running an outdated BITEARN
NODES, and the situation apparently persists, there are only 3 possibilities:
1. The LISTSERV maintainer doesn't know how to get a new BITEARN NODES and
doesn't know whom to ask (or maybe he did ask but his question wasn't
answered). The NIC can indeed help him in that case.
2. The LISTSERV maintainer is really lazy, and here again the NIC can help by
calling the individual in question and convincing him that what he is not
doing is something very necessary.
3. There was a change in LISTSERV maintainer, the old one left the shop and
the new one doesn't know there is such a thing as a 'LISTSERV' in his shop.
This is a situation that has to be straightened out, and here again a phone
call can help.
So, my constructive suggestion is that you should make a list of these sites,
or rather 2 lists, one for EARN nodes which you should send to Turgut, and one
for BITNET nodes. Then, call (or have whomever at the NIC is in charge of this
kind of things call) the corresponding postmasters, using the phone number in
the :contact tag of the site's PEERS NAMES entry. This may sound like a lot of
work, but if the end result is that all these sites will then update their
tables on a regular basis, it's worth it. You'll probably ask why I don't do
that myself. Because it's not my job, because it would take too much time,
because I don't hear anything on the phone (because my office is in the
machine room), and because long distance phone calls are expensive.
Eric
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