Subj : ERRORS in Route List!
To   : Andrea Santos
From : Carl Austin Bennett
Date : Tue May 08 2001 03:29 am

 AS> Gee Carl, but if we had "millions" of sysops and users, you might 
 AS> have a point.  But since we don't, the routelist isn't of much concern.

So how does keeping outdated routing info help us get back our lost userbase?

If anything, a Fido that can't reliably fetch mail will only lose more users.

 AS> Haven't bothered to pick one up yet.  Also can't remember the last 
 AS> time I sent someone a Moderator message via Netmail.

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

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?

If we're depending on the *C's to provide info for the *EC-generated lists and 
treating info from hubs and reverse-engineered paths as unofficial, then the 
missing NC's will result in both nodelist and routelist info being wrong.

CAB> A large part of the reason for using RVIA to flag independent feeds 
CAB> is as an informational tool for use in finding links to bypass any 
CAB> *C's who go AWOL.

 AS> How about a better method which is to inform the *C above of the 
 AS> problem so the node in question can be removed from the nodelist?

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

For instance, I had a problem with one of the +1-519- nets where the NC was 
down and I couldn't locate any valid nodes based on the information in the 
nodelist. LINUX_BBS echomail revealed one node who'd switched from POTS to 
telnet-only and taken an independent feed without the NC reporting this in the 
nodelist. The errors nearly cost this unsuspecting sysop his node number as he 
appeared to be gone. I do *not* want to see something like this happen again.

If an independent feed, an Internet server or anything else exists, I'd like to 
know about it for use in determining if that dead net's really dead.

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

Of the two sysops that I'd normally try to reach in region fourteen, both are 
*C's so my odds ought to be, in theory, better than average. Even for this 
small skewed sample, info in the *EC-generated routelsts has a 50% error rate.

I've taken any messages I needed to send to that pair to another network.

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

Andrea, I do realise the problems go beyond the routelist. After Ray Brown's 
system went down for the count in Y2K (and yes, Foxy still shows a route to him 
via the new RC14), Jeff Smith tried to sort out the mess and didn't have enough 
time to properly do so. Even Jeff's own local segment (Minneapolis) shows as 
many disconnected numbers as live modem connections. I've been trying to 
contact Michael McCabe to see if he can intervene; no response so far.

In the meantime, if Bobby or anyone else has info on any route into any node 
that hasn't already been reported, I would strongly encourage them to publish 
it. This information will be needed when the time comes to fix this whole mess

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