After investigation it appears that the people in charge of LISTSERV at PTEARN have attempted to set up an INFO-VAX peer without asking the list owners for permission (actually, I am pretty sure they have not even been notified). The result is a loop due to the lack of LISTSERV expertise of the people in question. This is the second time that this happens - PTEARN had already attempted to set up a peer for the LINKFAIL list and I had complained to them (I got apologies, and an offer to peer to EARNTECH instead). I would like to remind the PTEARN staff that: 1. It is technically impossible to set up a peer without the cooperation of the owner of the existing list. All that you can achieve without such cooperation is a kind of "half-peer", which may act like a sub list or may create loops, but will never be recognized as a peer by the network. 2. There is presently no technical need to set up a peer for *any* list in Portugal. There would need to be two orders of magnitude more users to justify one. A sub-list can be easily set up if you want to have postings locally archived for the PTEARN users. 3. LISTSERV is not a toy, but a tool. Its purpose is to help people communicate with each other; if this happens to further the political goals of managers who are concerned about the visibility of their site and its "importance" on the network, fine. If it doesn't, sorry. Setting up peers in such an uncoordinated fashion just for the sake of being able to have peers is irresponsible, and should not be tolerated. I hope that the problem will be corrected soon, and will not re-occur. Eric *---------------------- Original message follows -----------------------* I might be panicking unnecessarily, but there might be a loop on the INFO-VAX mailing list; since that list has such a high volume and such a high number of subscribers, I figured that it was better to post quickly. Below are portions of the headers I've received; the message text was identical. I have received at least ten pairs of identical messages form that list today; in each case, the headers look like the ones below. The "Comments:" field make me thing that there is something odd going on at [log in to unmask] (headers deleted for the sake of brevity)