The explanation is simple: 1. UCHCECVM installs LISTSERV. Their server appears to be working perfectly. 2. They send me mail explaining that they are the central node of Chile and would like to join the backbone. This sounds quite reasonable to me, and, although they only recently installed the code, the maintainer seems to be quite competent (from what I can gather). At least, he seems proficient with REXX and assembler, which is unfortunately not always the case, and sounds like he has several years of experience with VM. So, I add them to the backbone. 3. For some reason, I had sort of implicitly assumed that Chile was connected to Mexico. It never occured to me that they could have a direct line to the States, and that putting them on the backbone would therefore cause US stuff to go through them (the Mexico LISTSERV was already on the backbone, so I figured it wouldn't change anything). 4. Gonzalo contacted me to say that he was suddenly having serious problems with LISTSERV, and wanted to be removed from the backbone. This was something that I couldn't do in less than one week or so, since the CEARN-MOP queue was around 2500 (this was the famous week where FRMOP22 was down 37.7% of the time). Remember that PEERS NAMES is > 1700 records. Gonzalo's problem was that, apparently, files coming from RSCSV2 (his network RSCS) were processed with an origin of 'RSCSV2@UCHCECVM', which caused of course some problems. To avoid a possible loss of mail files, he decided to stop LISTSERV until the problem was solved. However I didn't get all this information at once, it took me several questions-and-answers to understand the nature of the problem. To me it looked like his LISTSERV had been configured with the wrong RSCS userid, which ought to take some 30 seconds to fix. During this time, Gonzalo made traces over traces of the REXX and assembler code, in an attempt to determine why it was not working. From what I understand they were running a non-Crosswell mailer which was retagging the output files (and/or using diag X'D4' to change their origin?), and for some mysterious reason it did not cause any problem at the beginning. In any case this was all my fault, not Gonzalo's. I should have seen that Chile was connected to the States, and changed the weights before adding them to the backbone. Gonzalo did his best to prevent the loss of mail files, which meant taking LISTSERV down for a while and spending as much time as he could tracking down the problem. Eric