Re: tin

raz@nospam.number5.apana.org.au
Fri, 30 Sep 1994 19:49:02 +1000

> "raz@nospam.number5.apana.org.au" wrote:
> >
> > Good and bad - good if your admin is incompetent, bad a nasty performance
> > hit. Assuming a well-administered system, nnmaster runs in the background
> > and saves significant network bandwidth.
> >
>
> Yes, this is the unfortunate side effect -- it places excessive demands
> on the NNTP server. The assumption about a "well-administered system"
> hasn't exactly been valid around here at certain times in the past
> (that's not to blame administators, there are resource constraints, so
> I hear). The quality of News at UTS is almost legendary.
>
> > Hmmm - I haven't looked into this - again, talk to your admin. Tell
> > INN to simply pick it up - again, network bandwidth optimisation is
> > somewhat better this way anyway.
>
> ditto.
>
> > Again - incompetent administration. What sort of idiot lets his news
> > spool get "full"?
>
> You've never had to deal with sequoia I see ? During '93, it averaged
> being "not full" for a small 8 hour window every 48 hours (correlated
> nicely with expiry runs).
>
> If your intention is to suggest that "incompetent administration" isn't
> a suitable factor in choosing between one item of software and another,
> I beg to differ. It's been a significant factor in choosing and using
> software and was the reason for _me_ using tin.

I knew UTS's feed was bad, but I had no idea... I'm flabbergasted - spool
overflow is such an easy problem to fix!

Thinking about it again, it was in my mind that the appropriate
solution to the problems that you were describing was news administration,
rather than users having to work around inoperative services. I accept
that in fact this is a good basis for your choice of tools - simple
pragmatism: the first criteria for tool selection is "will it do the
job? how well?". Thinking further though - progsoc (WE!) administer
ftoomsh. If we are discussing tools for use on ftoomsh and we assume
competent administration of the news spool (I don't regard myself
as qualified, yet - I've just noticed that nnmaster appears to have
evaporated on my machine... - in the absense of other volunteers
though, consider my hand raised...), this particular basis for comparison
will hopefully not matter.

Thanks for your perspective.

- Raz.