At 11:54 AM 1/27/99 -0500, Jay Fenello wrote: >And more importantly, it has experienced >continuing problems. People can't find >instructions on how to sign up, people >can't always sign up when they do find >the obscure instructions, and the list >operation has been sporadic at best. I have trimmed the folks who I thought wouldn't be interested in this message as it deals with list mechanics/operations. The IFWP list is run on a system with the commercially available Lyris package. Until this time, I had never heard of this package. Since then, the ISOC list is also using this package. In the meanwhile, MHSC has been evaluating other packages, including the defacto standard, Majordomo, with the MajorCool web interface, from NCR. The latter is quite a bit more setup work than Lyris, but I'll get into that later. The other contender is the ListServ package, from LSOFT, it is NOT cheap. MHSC has long been a fan of using defacto reference standards, sendmail, BIND, Linux, etc., for which we can get the source-code. There are various reasons for that. Majordomo, is one of them and we have it running now, in development-phase. The base package is rather short a few features and we've found MajorCool to have the web archival features and web-based interface. MHSC runs either Apache-SSL or Netscape Enterprise server for web-services, both are secured with MHSC.NET certificates. The DNSO.NET pages are on our production apache-ssl server. This server has now logged over 60 days continuous up-time. Please understand that heretofore, we have not been running any sort of mailer-list processing. We have been spending the past six weeks selecting and integrating the mailer-list software. It is almost ready. There are still some outstanding integration issues between majordomo and majorcool, as well as, some virtual mail hosting issues, between MHSC.NET and DNSO.NET, in sendmail. Since we are doing this in concurrance with offering SecureLists as a production release, this is being treated like an IT production process. This slows things down a bit, with additional pre-production testing, but usually yields a reliable service, once completed. The lack of such reliability is the major source of problems on the IFWP list. This brings us to the other issue. The Lyris package seems to have problems in both features and reliability. I am now observing failure in operations of three distinct lists, two of them are the IFWP list and the ISOC members discussion lists. It doesn't matter that I have not actually downloaded the Lyris software for evaluation. Simply watching three, presumably skilled, independent operators having similar troubles with the same software package is enough to convince me that there are problems there. OTOH, the sendmail/Majordomo/MajorCool/Apache combination works on more than 20% of the list servers on the Internet. A large part of the remainder is running ListServe, a very expensive commercial package. All of the above being said, we consider this very much to be alpha-production, by MHSC standards (no billing systems integration). MHSC is also considering support of IFWP and this whole Internet administration discussion group a pro bono public service. We will not charge for this service. This simplified things as we don't have to integrate this with our billing systems <whew>. Conversely, although we intend to run on production servers, with production levels of reliability, there will be some teething problems. We expect to have to respond rapidly with fixes and repairs. Overall, I expect to have the list server up in a few weeks, a little more (1 week) than than the two months I estimated in December. _________________________________________________ Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc. Roeland M.J. Meyer President and CEO. e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web-pages: http://staff.mhsc.com/ceo Web-site: http://www.mhsc.com Colorado Springs, CO - Livermore, CA - Morgan Hill, CA -----------------------------------------(legal notice)-------- Note: Statements made in this message do not necessarily reflect the position of MHSC. All forcasts and projections are to be considered as forward-looking and presume conditions which may not be referenced herein. -----------------------------------------(/legal notice)------- __________________________________________________ To receive the digest version instead, send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To SUBSCRIBE forward this message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNSUBSCRIBE, forward this message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Problems/suggestions regarding this list? Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___END____________________________________________
