From: davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs
Subject: Re: Sad to say...
Date: 15 Sep 92 14:55:15 GMT
Organization: Aegis Society, Kyoto Japan

elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us (Edward J. Branley) writes:

>davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane) writes:

>> I can understand the position they found themselves in. And given the
>> Fido penchant for wanting things free/low-cost to the user, I can
>> understand how it happened. It's one thing to provide stuff free to
>> others when most of the cost is your time, but ...
...

>Yeah, the sentiments were noble originally, but the power has corrupted the
>system, IMHO.

Perhaps. Maybe it's due to what G.I. Gurjieff said was "man's inherent
tendency to wiseacre" :-)

>> Well, hmmm, occording to the last two posts I just replied to that's
>> pretty low: one person was doing 15-30 MB/day. So there is Fidonet traffic
>> and there is Fidonet traffic :-)

>This is true.  A lot depends on just how much of the backbone you're pulling
>into your system.  It's growing, as you can see from some of the more recent
>numbers...

Yes, I can see that it's so.

>> I'm not sure what you mean by 'encode a file' as in encrypt? I think
>> not.  As in uuencode? I think not. As in compress? If so, then there
>> isn't all that much difference between USENET news which goes as
>> batched/compressed archives of 60-100K. *Mail* ususally goes unbatched
>> and uncompressed unless you have something like uubatch installed (which
>> Aegis uses for it's link to the U.S.).
>>
>> Could you explain what you mean a bit more? BTW, this isn't just
>> idle curiousity: there are some people here talking about an FTN
>> over which stuff would be ported to local machines. While I myself
>> think that UUCP links are "easier" (because I understand them :-)
>> other people think FT is easier so I'd really like to know.

>Ok, I see I didn't do to well explaining that.  Here we batch and compress
>netnews.  That's not bad, but ZIP and ARJ (which are the two leading
>compression formats for xmitting FTN-sytle echomail) do a better job of
>compression.  That's never really been a big issue in Usenet because of faster
>transmission channels, multi-tasking hosts, etc.  It's a big deal to the sysop
>footing the bill himself, of course.

I don't know about ARJ but I haven't found any consisten advantage
between pkzip, lharc, and compress. All depends on the data (over
which you have not control). As for faster communication channels,
yes, on the backbones, but the dial-up links run at about the same
speed as anything else. 

>On files:  here, we uuencode a file and post it to a newsgroup.  Those articles
>are then batched and compressed.  Some savings of space, but uuencoding adds
>its own overhead to accomplish this process.  In FTNs, files are transmitted in
>a compressed format (normally ZIP, graphics in GIF) without being uuencoded and
>posted to an echo.  There exists now a whole suite of programs to handle file
>transfers through FTN mailers the same way echomail is handled.  Files will
>come in from your uplink, then they'll be dumped into the proper storage dir,
>then control files written to xmit a copy to anyone further down the link who
>desires those files.  Because they deal with the native (albeit compressed)
>files rather than uuencoded news articles, these distribution chains are more
>efficient.  Also, taking the uuencode/uudecode step out of the loop eliminates
>one of the possible causes for xmit error.

I think the same thing could be done with UUCP which is, after all,
only a file transfer protocol plus the ability to excute commands on
the receiving side.

IMHO what you're talking about is some kind of line charge
efficiency at the cost of a lot of time and effort to make it
happen. What seemed weird when I went to UNIX/UUCP was this kind of
thinking pretty much gets thrown out the window. Instead, you use
the simplest protocol you can so many places can link up without a
lot of hassles (remember UUCP isn't dependent on any particular OS
or hardware). This means that the sysadmins don't have to do so much
to fiddle this and improve that to *save* money, they can do other
things that *make* money or find other means of support. Make
for some very different equations.

>> Are you saying individual sysops can control their feeds from the
>> receiving side? If so, this sound really great. I'd like to be able
>> to do that with USENET.

>Same here.  The program I used to use in fido was called AreaFix.  What you did
>was send mail to Areafix @ the node who was your feed.  The subject line of the
>message was a password and any params you wanted to pass to the program.  If
>the pw agreed with the one in your feed's config file, then you the commands
>you keyed into the body of the message were executed.  These commands normally
>added/deleted your node number from the line for a particular echo.  I know
>that something like this for Usenet would make many a sysadmin happy.

Sure would make me happy! But a lot of sysadmins don't want to let
anything operate on their machine except rnews & rmail. They are
afraid of security problems with anything else. And perhaps rightly
so...

>> As for the different rates for compression, my tests say there is no
>> clear winner with zip, lharc or compress. It all depends on what the
>> data is. USENET typically runs compress as zip/lharc are slower under
>> UNIX (they have run faster under DOS as they have been optimized for it).

>I find the DOS-based compress that I run to be much less efficient than ZIP.  I
>understand the rationales for using it, however, and all my calls on this net
>are local, so it doesn't really concern me.  Again, being able to adapt fast
>when it comes to changing compression formats is one of the advantages Fidonet
>has being essentially an all-PC net.

Yes, I believe Fidonet mainly (only?) runs on IBM-compat PC/XT/AT's.
UNIX runs on AT's and many other machines as well so instead of being
able to adapt fast, it uses the lowest-common-demoninator approach.

>> I'm curious: how much stuff were they typically getting on a daily
>> basis?  How much were they paying in telco charges? And who was
>> paying, exactly, the sysop of the users, both?

>I don't know what they were paying, never thought to ask.  The
>folks calling in did so about once a week or so, fetched my new
>files list, then would call back if I had added anything of interest
>to them.  I *assume* this was a better deal for them, since I know
>that calling Europe from here runs about $2/minute. 

I see. I thought they were calling in at least once a day. 

FYI, calls from Japan to the U.S. are metered in terms of 6 second
units. Lowest rate is at night which costs 22 yen/6-secs for the
first 1 minute and then 11 yen/6-sec afterwards. In round numbers it
takes 1 minute to CONNECT and get UUPC link running which costs 220
yen ($1.76) and the rest goes at 110 yen/minute ($.88). Not so
bad....

Thanks for all the intesting details.

Dave

--
Dave McLane 
JUNET: davidg@aegis.or.jp (ONLY within Japan: post otherwise)
Nagaokakyoshi, Kyoto Japan Tel: +81-75-951-1168 Fax: +81-75-957-1087