Subj : ERRORS in Route List!
To   : Andrea Santos
From : Carl Austin Bennett
Date : Tue May 08 2001 12:01 pm

 AS> A routelist has very little, if anything to do with our users.  How 
 AS> many of them do you suppose pick this thing up?

You've missed one key point here: behind the "no route found" and tombstone 
entries are downlink systems which are not getting any mail at all.

 CAB> The moderator "take it to netmail" demand is a common way to try to
 CAB> move a flame thread out of an echo. If you were a big, important
 CAB> moderator like Bobby, you'd need to be able to do this quite often.

 AS> Really?  Perhaps some moderators have thin skin.  Last I looked, at 
 AS> least per one hub's stats, I moderate an echo which is in the top 10 in 
 AS> traffic. I also don't send netmail. ;-)

If you need to contact a user's sysop or one of the hubs, you'll need netmail

 CAB> NC's have been known to disappear without warning; that at least two 
 CAB> NC's in Region 14 alone answer voice as wrong numbers, two more are 
 CAB> numbers that are out of service and a few others just don't answer at 
 CAB> all isn't news to anyone.

 AS> What's this have to do with a routelist?

Foxy is listing all of these dead NC's as if they were regularly polling their 
RC for mail. They're not. It just creates one big dead letter office, and by 
removing both the priority fields and the "no route found" this gives the 
appearance of a live, working route when the mail actually never gets through.

If these are just "no route found" that've been defaulted somewhere, say so!

 AS> If you're so concerned about Region 14, start calling all the nodes and 
 AS> report the no answers to RC14.

I've tried using another network to get mail to RC14. I still get no response.

 AS> If that gets you nowhere, send the info to the Z1C.

What good would that do? She's still listing Ray Brown as a live node!

 CAB> When that *C tries to put what's left of the net back together, the
 CAB> information regarding all feeds into it is needed.

 AS> And what if "all feeds" no longer exist based on what's left?

That's definitely something which that *C would want to know, eh?

 AS> So how much netmail are you or your Region members trying to send to
 AS> Nets with AWOL NCs in Region 14?

I have no idea how much netmail anyone else has sent (as netmail is supposed to 
be private) but as an individual user I've given up on getting any ERN into R14 
as the routing information is suspect to say the least.

 CAB> As for the live nodes with dead NC's (Jerry Olney, Timothy Trace, 
 CAB> Lee Lefler, Dan Rosenthal, Scott Heider, Kevin McVay, Robert Pederson
 CAB> and Greg Thornhill) I doubt I'd even try to use this broken excuse 
 CAB> for a network to write to them, even though I do know Greg from my 
 CAB> othernet days where he ran a fine BBS.

 AS> Okay, but you aren't sending ERN to these people.

I've got an account on Greg's system. If I have anything to say, I'll leave him 
a message there or send him an e-mail as this network is evidently broken.

 AS> I don't know what the routelist shows, but Ray Brown and Net 286 have 
 AS> been removed from the Nodelist.  Whoever attended to that forgot to attend
 AS> to Ray's Fido help node number, 1:1/117, which also needs to be removed.

The zone independent nodes are under ZC control; RC14 cannot remove them.

 AS> Per your mention of Robert Pederson, it's Gary Petersen who is still 
 AS> listed as NC290, yet he's been out of Fidonet for over a year and notified 

 AS> ALL of his departure in various places.

And yet the routelst is written in such a way as to suggest that Gary is still 
picking up mail from Michael McCabe to pass on to Robert and the others. Ouch!

 AS> Net 290 doesn't exist.  I've verified that Robert is up and running 
 AS> with a mailer, but he's the only node left in 290 and needs to be 
 AS> incorporated in another R14 net or be assigned an RIN.

How do you expect that to happen if the R14 nodelist isn't being updated?

 CAB>> In the meantime, if Bobby or anyone else has info on any route into
 CAB>> any node that hasn't already been reported, I would strongly 
 CAB>> encourage them to publish it.

 AS> And what if it's not confirmable or, in the end, not wanted?

Wasn't that why all that independent node info was moved out of the main list 
and dropped to a separate (and quite ignorable) section at the end?

I don't think that's the biggest problem. That there are nodes to which there 
is no route at all should be of greater concern as they're not getting mail.

--- Msged/LNX TE 06
 * Origin: Pause-Caf‚ Kingston 613-549-5599 telnet:cafe.dyndns.org (1:249/116)

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