All,
How much sleep Cliff Otto is getting is really not all that important
to me. I am bothered that he obviously believes that he can
participate in the thread of an otherwise constructive and public
discussion taking place on VA-Bird without having to worry about who
he offends. This, I suspect, does not have have much to do with his
own sleep habits or requirements.
Furthermore, I don't see any proof that the people participating in
the thread of this discussion need to get a "firmer grasp" on all the
issues involved before contributing to this discussion in one way or
another. Cliff making this point, hardly makes it so.
While Cliff's fascinating description of how the internet works is
well-written and correct, I don't think his post contributes much to
this discussion. How a link to a web site monitoring internet traffic
has much to do with some of the larger issues that have been raised
in this discussion is a mystery to me.
The idea that network traffic in general and mail server traffic in
particular can be slow; taken down altogether; or be problematic for
all kinds of reasons, including human error and configuration
problems is really not news, even to the ludites among us. I don't
believe anyone is suggesting that VA-Bird is historically more or
less well performing than the rest of the internet.
Rather than stating the obvious online, perhaps Cliff, with his firm
grasp of how the internet works might be willing to work with others
off line to help members of this community solve some of their own
continuing human error and/or technical support issues as relates to
VA-Bird?
Setting individual technical problems aside, among other things,
members of this community have asked a couple of very important
questions. Is a more robust alternative to VA-Bird available? What
would this solution cost, and would members of this community be
willing to underwrite these costs? Is there any inherent value in
eliminating local list serv's in favor of a single statewide list
serv? Is there any value in switching to architecture that would make
VA-Bird archives searchable? These are all very good questions that
really don't have much to do with Cliff's very fine grasp of how the
internet works.
Paul Kane
Falls Church, VA
On Aug 26, 2006, at 5:49 AM, Cliff Otto wrote:
It's almost 5 a.m. and I haven't been to sleep yet, and I really
don't care if I offend people. I'd suggest that some of the people
jumping on the dump-FreeLists bandwagon should get a firmer grasp on
all the issues involved. The internet suffers from equipment failure
and operator error. The former could be hard drive failure, power
outages, someone cutting a cable; the latter could be someone falling
asleep on the job or being overworked or failing to configure a
system optimally...or many other things.
There is a website called the Internet Traffic Report <http://
www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm> that monitors the
backbones of the internet. Currently in North America we see this
report:
Avg. Response Time: 71 (msec)
Avg. Packet Loss: 1 %
Total Routers: 50
Network up: 96 %
That's pretty good, and probably better than normal. Contrast that
with South America:
Avg. Response Time: 306 (msec)
Avg. Packet Loss: 16 %
Total Routers: 6
Network up: 83 %
There are only four percent of the networks down in North America,
but two of them are in Texas and people in the Dallas/Pampa areas
will be having problems using the internet. Email goes out in packets
and 16% of the packets are being lost in South America. There will be
many message never getting to their destinations. While 1% seems like
a small figure, consider the volume of traffic. It's huge.
One needs to be certain that the problem actually lies with FreeLists
(Avenir Technologies), who runs the servers or with the Ecartis
software they use before disrupting this list by moving it. One might
start by asking whether Mr. Mocko has VA-Bird configured optimally.
He may very well have, but the list if highly configurable and
perhaps other settings would help. For one thing, you should be able
to set your subscription so you will receive a copy abck from the
list server of any message you send to it. This might be useful for
those experiencing problems. Problems can arise because many email
programs do not conorm completely with recognized-standards. This
could trigger spam filters, or even composing email with a word
processor might add non-visible formatting characters that could
trigger the filters. A couple of instances from my life will serve to
illuminate this.My sister frequently forgets to add a subject to her
emails to me and my anti-virus program does not like this. Each tiem
I get one, it pops up with a "Suspicious Subject" warning and I have
to tell it to ignore it...twice. However, some other messages without
subjects do not set off the alarm. Is the problem with my a/v program
or is it because different email programs with different treatments
are being used to send the respective messages? Also, I get messages
flagged as potential spam because of "unusual white space"--too many
carriage returns before the actual message begins.
There are many, many things that could be the root of the problem,
including the mail server of your ISP. I think it important to remove
the local considerations before embarking on exteme steps to solve a
problem that may just be inhernet to the very nature of the internet.
C'est ça,
Cliff Otto
Alexandria
