I have eventually been able to logon to ERIC@CEARN, after a lot of unsuccessful attempts via a series of devious means featuring four levels of pass-through-ing, only to find out that there must be some kind of bug or mis-configured file which makes it impossible for ERIC@CEARN to use the INSTALL command. Only ERIC@FRECP11 can do it. But depair ye not, for I shall surely manage to find a way out... When FRECP11 goes down for its vacations, we will hold all the files destined for it at CEARN (since FRORS31 purged them the last 2 years). Then it won't be any problem to send a DISTRIBUTE job from ERIC@FRECP11 to LISTSERV@CEARN and collect the results from the RSCS file queue :-) Eric