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Sat, 11 Feb 1995 03:58:03 +0100 |
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Message of Fri, 10 Feb 1995 21:03:52 EST from LISTSERV
give-and-take forum < [log in to unmask]> |
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I think there is a misunderstanding about DISTRIBUTE, its purpose, and
its future. It is NOT a mechanism to make other, wealthier/nicer people
take care of your deliveries (at least not unless explicitly set up this
way, as in the case of a unix server doing the deliveries for a VM
system; presumably when this happens the owner of the target machine has
agreed to the intended usage). The purpose of DISTRIBUTE is to conserve
bandwidth and improve delivery delays by doing the following:
1. Have each organization receive only ONE copy of any bulk delivery
message meant for multiple recipients at that organization (usually
the recipients are on multiple hosts). This is not "other people's
traffic", this is traffic destined to your users. You're going to have
to process it anyway; you might as well do so in an efficient manner
and minimize the load on your external lines. This is particularly
important outside of the US and for smaller organizations that can't
afford a T1 at $35k/year or so.
2. Provide a second level of optimization by doing the same thing for
"regions" and ensuring that only one copy of the message is ever sent
to each region. A region would be a group of computers, typically
connected to other regions via an expensive line. A typical example is
an academic network outside the US, or a service provider. It is
clearly in the interest of such providers to squeeze as much value as
possible from their trunk lines and to provide the best possible level
of service to their customers.
The implementation in LISTSERV-NJE, being based on the BITNET topology,
generates too many hops. In practice it's not so bad, but the point is
that this is not the target for the LISTSERV-TCP/IP backbone of the
future. The target is one DISTRIBUTE server per organization and then one
(or a few) server per region, with sub-regions if appropriate. A
DISTRIBUTE-only license costs on the order of $500-600/year for unix or
VMS, which should hardly be an obstacle to any regional organization. The
only reason we're charging for it is that this is about what it costs us
to answer questions and help people with problems. We don't want to pipe
large amounts of mail through servers for which there is no support
agreement. Technically you could use the evaluation copies of LISTSERV
for that, and they are free, so in fact you can already get a free
DISTRIBUTE server if you positively have no money.
Eric
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