At 02:52 AM 2002-03-09 -0500, Ron Jarrell wrote: >At 01:46 PM 3/8/02 -0800, John W Baxter wrote: > >Aside: how far we've come from the old mainframe LISTSERV, the network of > >which carefully sent one copy along with a list to addresses to various > >neighbors "near" the addressees for further distribution. So quite likely, > >only one copy crossed the Atlantic...possibly one one went from Chicago to > >Florida, etc etc. > >Still does, to some extent. Listserv passes jobs to other listservs when it >can figure out that's useful. Also, part of the license fee for running >listserv >is access to be able to distribute big jobs to lsofts large server, and >let them >deal with delivering it for you.
Actually, the recent releases say things in their control file like "This server has been down since 1999 and it does not look like it will ever be brought up again." And Listserv has gone "open source". I have decided to migrate away from my hand tuned Majordomo 1, and I have been investigating various mailing list programs. (Mailman is one of them -- and I am still unsure what version I should install --- since this is a new attempt at installation, should I install the beta, or should I stick with the stable version? -- I really want custom footers...) I got a copy of the open source listserv, and I have compiled it, but so far as I can tell, the distribution is missing essential text files that do not come except with a licensed prepared binary copy - it is about to get deleted from my system, even though it seems to have a bunch of nice features, and I have a kind of nostalgic desire to run it. The folding of network topology knowledge into the mail distribution manager made sense when networks were simpler - and when they typically were store and forward. Remember that the network this was made for was an "NJE" or "RSCS" store and forward network - the unit of transmission was not the packet, it was an e-mail (actually, file, an e-mail was just a file with a special name)...the e-mail was not sent directly to a destination, in fact, there was no way to get to the destination "directly" unless it was local. The e-mail was sent to a node that was closer to the destination. And that node figured out a route and sent it on forward. It *could* take days for a message to cross the Atlantic if the links were saturated. And it was not unheard for a bunch of messages to be spun off to tape, and for that tape to be Fedexed or DHL'd to a node much closer to the destination, so as to get around an overloaded link. (We used a bitnet like network in IBM --- and sometimes there was only a small pathway between countries, with files that could take a day in transit tying it up. Early versions of the protocol could send one thing at a time across a link, and short files were preferred, but once a long file started, it monopolized the link until it finished. Later versions could subdivide a link and multiplex.) The point was that the machines like Listserv, or the thing called Toolsrun that we used inside of IBM, could "understand" the network topology and could shed subscriptions to closer servers. As well as holding archives closer to the end user.... But these days, frankly, teaching your mailing list server about network topology seems counter-productive. The knowledge of network topology belongs, if anywhere, in the MTA and the database that describes that, in our case, the DNS. For example, the concept of "Florida" is more or less meaningless. My system is in Florida, the one that I am typing this note on. The packets that leave this system go to a router that, I am told, has a "Florida" name when I reverse translate it, but which is actually in Chicago somewhere. They actually traverse the link on something that is probably ATM, with virtual circuits set up so that it is actually a small piece of a bigger pipe -- but the next time that this is surfaced into a router that looks at the IP layer is across the country. So for me to look for an IRC server that is in Chicago is sort of silly. Those packets at least go across the country once, and then they might come back to Florida - even if they come back on XO's net, they cross the country twice. Putting this sort of "layer violation" in Listserv was probably essential at the time. A link of 4800 BPS or slower was not uncommon at the time that the Bitnet protocols were designed. 1200 was the limit for dial-ups, and a lot of mail was moved by store and forwards such as bitnet, or even uucpnet. For a long time, RSCS nodes would not burst - that is, you could not drop a piece of mail into the RSCS or NJE networks with multiple destinations and have it manage the shipment of copies to end nodes. Every destination had to have its own copy traversing those slow links. But had that existed from day one, the listserv and toolsrun shedding of subscriptions to "closer" nodes might never have existed. From my listserv control file: ># NOTE: as of May 1999 the global server is down, and it may never be ># re-established. So for now the following two items should remain ># commented out. - Harold > ># Define the global query server for all lists worldwide. If you ># don't want your server to forward requests for unknown lists, ># comment out this line. Otherwise, you should leave it as-is. ># >#global-query-server [EMAIL PROTECTED] listproc.listproc.net 372 > ># Define the master server for collecting global list information, and ># the time to send a list of published lists daily. Comment this out ># if you don't want your server to notify the global server about your ># published lists. Otherwise, this should be left as-is. ># >#global-update-server [EMAIL PROTECTED] 04:00 -- War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made so by the exertions of better men than himself. -- John Stuart Mill Nick Simicich - [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
