Hopefully it seems that my userid is still here, and by night EB0UB011 is staff-free ( :-) ), so that I'll try to raise what I find an important topic before leaving. I would have liked to speak of that some time after 1.5j was distributed, but that's possibly my last access to the net for some time. Now that LISTSERV 1.5j is to be released soon, we'll be able to have peered filelists at will. I think it would be time to try to organize all the actual mess of servers there is on the net. Last year, when I started discovering EARN and BITNET, I spent about two months of my extra time to find what were the servers, what did they contain, etc (see Chris Condon's work on that and ask him if you don't believe me :-)). Each server has a different syntax and offers different services; most of them don't have internet capabilities and the format of their directories is seldom informative. Now with LISTSERV these services can be migrated with great advantage (some of them already have done the migration, eg TCSSERVE). But I feel that migrating to LISTSERV is not sufficient. What I'd like to see is a standarized set of well documented listserv filelists, one for each topic (possibly with some sons in a tree structure). For example, there could be a REXXUTIL FILELIST with all those nice utilities that operate on REXX programs (like REXXCOMP et al), another (this one probably forming a tree structure) for Kermit programs, another for VM SYSPROGS, etc. All those filelists could be peered between the sites willing to host a copy; a central directory of what filelists will exist and where can they be found should be maintained (and probably an extract of it could replace the actual fileserver section of BITNET SERVERS). Some trivial user exits to redirect GETs to the nearest server could be written to reduce traffic; and perhaps also an approach like Eric's one with PEERS FILELIST could be taken: we could define a 'server backbone' (perhaps different from the actual backbone) and store *all* the directories on each server, along with information about where the real stuff is hosted for each filelist. Then every server in the backbone will virtually offer the complete library while hosting only a part of it; users will be able to request any file in the standard library (which will be huge) without having to search every server and will almost not notice if the file they were requesting was or not physically in the server they sent their command to. I realize all that would represent an *enormous* lot of work (one of the most boring parts of it being contacting file owners, getting permissions, explaining how to remotely maintain the files, etc), but I'm sure there will be people disposed to give part of their time to this project. I'm afraid this won't work without a serious coordination tho. That's one of my dreams. I'm sure that if someone shares it I'll find it started when I'll be back on the net, thanks to the good work of all of you. Jose Maria