"Try FTP-ing something from anywhere in Europe to Germany and you will understand immediately. We're talking about a dozen retries ..." I act as the intermediary between the world Oracle network and the Internet, FTP'ing a dozen images or so images a week on the average, from all over the world, and while you're right, that FTP'ing on the Internet is slow, it is not subject to failure. I've left large FTPs running all night w/o problems. One thing worth noting is that while it may be busy here, on the daylight side, it will be slack tide on the far side, traffic-wise. This can safely be expected to be a pattern for the interminable future, independent of the actual bandwidth constraints. It kind of evens out, it's always slow doing business internationally, especially when you're verifying packet contents and doing checksums and the like. " ... and each time over a hundred keystrokes." Cut and paste. "When I don't know what I'm talking about, I either check my facts or keep quiet, to avoid embarassing myself in public with erroneous statements." I venture my opinion in the hopes that I will learn from my mistakes, myself. It's much faster than the 'preserve-one's-facade-of-universal-competence-at- all-costs' school of thought. "And it's not even written in C or OOPS/CASE. I'm sure your users are very concerned about the model followed by BITNET and its popularity in a certain category of "executive-oriented" magazines." That's true, before it moves to Unix - and it will, it is - it'll have to be rewritten. I see no call for spurious insults of unknown user communities, Eric Thomas. We are all bound by the whims of our user communities, to some degree. -- richard ===== -- richard childers [log in to unmask] 1 415 506 2411 oracle data center -- unix systems & network administration Klein flask for rent. Inquire within.