From: elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us (Edward J. Branley)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs
Subject: Re: Sad to say...
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 92 08:23:18 CDT
Organization: Minas Tirith BBS (Public Access Usenet for New Orleans)

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 ...
>
> In my case, give people choices: if they want it to be free, then
> they have to incur the time=money cost of putting up what others
> want to read. If they want to have somebody else provide them with
> stuff to read, they have to incur the yen=money to cover their
> out-of-pocket costs.

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

> 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...

> 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.

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.

>
> >It's also easier to discriminate in terms of what you want and don't want to
> >carry in fidonet.  For example, my news feed only has 256 bytes for a feeds
> >entry for my site.  As a result, it's much easier for them if I just take fu
> >heirarchies rather than trying to select individual groups.  This means I'm
> >taking in more than I really need to.  No biggie, it's a free feed and a fre
> >call.  In fidonet, however, there are several good control programs that a
> >sysop could use to handle additions/deletions of echos from their feeds.  Th
> >it's easy for a sysop to only take the echos he/she's interested in, keeping
> >the overall phone bill down as much as possible.  Also, most fidonet sites n
> >use ZIP compression, which does a much better job than compress.
>
> 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.

>
> 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.

> 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.




>Edward J. Branley         elendil@mintir.new-orleans.la.us<
>Seashell Software, Metairie, LA            +1-504-455-5087<