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