Subj : Nodelist Phone Field (consistency?)
To   : Ozz Nixon
From : Kees van Eeten
Date : Wed Jun 20 2018 05:33 pm

Hello Ozz!

19 Jun 18 21:05, you wrote to All:

 ON>    Instead of using -Unpublished- for the phone field for a lot of the
 ON> unlist or TCP based systems, and in other zones we are using 000-0-0-0-0,
 ON> why not use

 Somewhere in the history of Fidonet the notation 000-x-x-x-x was introduced
 to store IP adresses. That use of the phone field is now discouraged and
 not all IP mailers support.

 Older versions og Makenl only allowed -Unpublished- in the phonefield for
 Nodes tagged as Pvt (Privat). Later versions of makenl allowed -Unpublised-
 to be used in the Phonenumber files of common nodes, but not for nodes
 tagges as e.g. Zone,Region or Host. Apparent some administrators are using
 old versions of makenl and are forced to use the 000 notations to prevent
 these lines to be flagged as error.

 The aim is to have -Unpublished- in all phonenumber fields when there is
 no phonenumber available. All other seemingly harmless notations are bound
 to be interpreted as something that is real somewhere in the World.

 ON> 000-0-0-0-0 for both 000-0-0-0-0 and -Unpublished-? Since we (Fido)
 ON> have
 ON> always been about optmization and small as possible node list lines ...
 ON> this proposal would save us 2 bytes on every line currently yielding
 ON> -Unpublished-. This weeks node list has 1024 -Unpublished- enrties, this
 ON> switch would literally shrink the uncompressed nodelist by 2kb.

 If you ofset that space to the fact that most filesystems on current size
 disks, use blocksizes of 4kb, where is your gain.

 If you really want to save on the size of the Nodelist for storage, propose
 to reduce the size of the prolog and epilog. These secttions are about half
 of the total size of the nodelist.

 Size was important when disks were small and transmission costs high.
 Neither are true in this age of Internet connections and multi Tb disks.

 ON> Thank you for your time,

 You are welcome.

Kees

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 * Origin: As for me, all I know is that, I know nothing. (2:280/5003.4)

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