SEMiSLUG 9 May 1996

Question and Answer Sessions

Arborcoast Software: Anybody know about them?: Spin-off of Zycom. They do process control. Ask MJO if he knows?
Good notebooks that support multiple OSes (i.e. DOS & Linux)?: Toshibas are always nice. Many votes on this one.
Any old routing hardware for sale?: Nope.
Americast? (A venture of 6-7 phone companies to do cable interactive TV.): No one seems to know much.
How do some web sites manage to get listed in so many places? (How do you spam a search engine?): Use lots if interesting key words. Try feeding your URL to interesting sites. Be a paid advertiser. Play games with meta-tags.
How do you mail a sparse file?: Use dump. Or gnu tar (which does its own compression). [It's a 2 terabyte file; this should be interesting]
What is that?: A file where the system knows that nulls are no data. (i.e. most blocks in the file are empty)
Has anyone talked to any from Pointcast?: Nobody, it seems. If anyone has more than marketing info, let Ed V. know.
How can you send sendmail about 250,000 outgoing messages without it crashing?: Talk to Gene Rachow, manager of the Sun Managers mailing list.
File locking: how does region locking work work on an Alpha?: A mount parameter, perhaps?
Any Michigan ISP's running BGP4?: Coast-to-Coast will be soon. Branch is. Msen, soon. (In short, it allows you to broadcast your own routes to anyone that will listen to you. It's a prerequisite for peer routing between ISP's.) AGN is not.
What's the status of American Global Network (i.e. RabbitNet-2)?: We'll pretend we didn't hear that.
Radio networking news?: Not a single new. Check out Cylink?
Selective reader? One that reads locally if the group is local, but via NNTP if it's not?: Go looking for it. It's the Holy Grail of newsgreader features.

Presentations

Making sure people can connect to the Internet.

Ed Vielmetti: Net Co-op

Cooperatives vs. regular businesses

Democratic ownership
Return is minimal
Member-owners vote for officers, etc.
e.g. rural electric co-op, etc.

Needs:

Routing agreements with other networks
Willingness to put up with dealing with the phone company
Ten's of thousands of dollars of hardware
Time to spend making it work

While there may be a desire in the community, the need is not dire. It would be nice to have cooperation on local routing so that two systems in the same city don't have to route through places hundreds of miles away. A co-op can function as a neutral entity in making such arrangements.

Steve Simmons: MIMP-2

In the old days ...

Most traffic was UUCP
We needed a way to make sure mail and news propagated to the sites in the area.
Define what mi.* newsgroups are legit and define their charters.

It worked well, but we've largely outrun the need for news and mail connectivity. IP access is covering most of that. The need to manage mi.* is still there.

It would be good to see a new MIMP mailing list that draws on the news manages at various local sites.

Suggest tossing mi.* and replacing it with michigan.*.

Rumor and Innuendo (no names, please)

MIMP-2 is plotting to end the mi.* news hierarchy!
Digiphone started disappearing off the phone a couple weeks ago. Rumor mill has it that an intellectual property issue is involved.
The FreeBSD port of Netscape appears to be a hacked version of the BSDI version.