blfp on usenet
arpavax:mark
If you really want to have btl.ALL newsgroups, it won't help much unless
the btl sites for a complete subnet of usenet. Right now it's a very
piecemeal thing - to go through usenet links between btl sites you
could very well have to go through ucbvax, decvax, and duke. I suggest
that one btl site serve as the focal point for usenet and that everybody
have a connection to that site. (Any BTL volunteers to be a central site?
It means more traffic coming through your site, but being only one hop
from ucbvax instead of two.) I would prefer for usenet to be branchier
than it is - right now it seems to be heading toward a star net with ucbvax
being the center (duke is too, but they don't seem to mind) and we'd rather
not have to send a copy of sf-lovers to every site on the net ourselves.)
Some cooperative arrangement of core sites, say one at IH, one at MH, etc
might also be a good idea, to even it out a little.
For those readers that aren't on usenet and never hope to be, it is possible
to distribute blfp to them automatically by putting their machine on usenet
anyway! (On paper, that is. Or would you believe, in bits.) For example,
suppose that ihnss is on usenet, ihuxg is not, and users grg and abc on
ihuxg want to get blfp. What you do is put ihuxg in the L.sys file on
ihnss, tell it to only forward newsgroups btl.ALL, and the command is
mail ihuxg!grg ihuxg!abc
where the article is put on stdin. Or, you could use
usend - ihuxg!~uucp/blfp ; mail ihuxg!grg ihuxg!abc < blfpmsg
to usend it and tell them a message exists, and only have one copy over
a fast net. (I don't know the details about usend so I'm guessing
at the syntax.)
As for submitting articles, if someone wants to save them up and digest
them, that's fine, but if nobody wants to, (or if quick turnaround is
a desirable property, something I personlly like) any site running
delivermail can set up an alias so that mail to thatsite!blfp
will be fed into netnews and sent to the right places.
Mark