Original Message Date: 15 Mar 92 23:03:56 From: Henk Wevers on 2:500/1 To: Tom Jennings on 1:125/111 Subj: Divs ^AINTL 1:125/111 2:500/1 Hi Tom, Long time no talk. A few things. 1) I heared from Randy that you have inquired about what is going on in zone 2. a short explanation: - we have been organized in europe traditionally in what some people call overlapping nets, others social nets. Not only in Holland, but in other regions as well. This is partly my doing because when I was handling the nodelist I allowed this (contrary to the RC's in zone 1) because I rather had all people using fidonet technology in one nodelist in stead of 'alternets'. For new nodes there is no problem, you either join a regional organized net, or join one of the club nets to your liking. Remember we were doing this years before we had any policy. - we now have a ZC (Ron Dwight) who believes that Policy 4 is the one and only law and should be obeyed, no matter what. Eg, we should end our old nets and reorganize. - some regions showed Ron the middle finger and said that the sysops in the regions concerned would know best themselves how they would be organized. And that no one outside their region would have any technical problem with the way the region was organised. (Most regions have 1 inbound gate for mail). - Well, being unable to made the region and the Rc involved do what he wanted them to do, and because the regions did not want another Rc (they were content with their rc, who was doing what they wanted) Ron decided to remove the RC's concerned from the fidonet nodelist and stopped processing nodelist updates from those regions. - Region 28 (holland) in front as usual mailed bundles of complaints to the IC, who replied that he would not interfere and that Ron was right anyway. Policy is law, period. - We are now stuck at the moment, Ron has threathened to reorganize the nodes into other nets himself (apperently using phonenumbers) because he can find no-one in the regions concerned who would follow his 'orders'. So far the current state. According to Matt, the Zc only RC's can throw Ron out of teh ZC 'job'. Also according policy and Matt and Ron, Ron appoints the Rc's. Nice cobstruction that is.... The only real thing I can think of now is to start our own zone nodelist and distribute that. As the two 'club nets' in holland take a large part in distribution of the diffs in europe this could be done. I proposed this in a conference as a friendly revolution and appearently made Ron really mad. So here it is. I have not started making my own zone nodelist yet. It will put europe in a bad shape, although lots of sysops agree with me. I also don't like to give in and make another 'alternet' and loose connections with old friends. Any suggestions from your side ? Any idea how to handle this ? Talking does not help any more. As far as I know you I am sure you dislike this self appointed power using policy as THE law as much as I do. So this message really means: HEEEEEEEELP ! 2) Now for the fun part. The TipTop project by Randy and me. The project is a way to stabilze echo and netmail in europe by using the Eunet (uucp) transatlantic link in off peak hours. Randy and I (in this order) cotacted the Eunet executives and got their approval. We are in the testphase but we are able to move (echo) mail transparantly, eg seen from my system Randy's node is located in amsterdam. We move a lot of conferences, netmail and the uucp gatemail already. I am organizing non profit organisations in european regions to handle the costsharing for getting the (echo) into their region. One of the rules of TipTop is that a regional TipTop gate must pass every echomail conference on the TipTop backbone to every net in the region that wants it. There are some rules for costsharing (you know us, shareware does not work very well in europe, people try to get free rides as much as possible), but basically the idea is that it should be fair and open. I have seen remarkable results already, exit echomail powerplay in europe. I am trying to make myself redundant by the end of this year. If you want more info, I'll send the current docs. Oh yes, TipTop stands for Transatlantic Internet Project, Topdown organized. The technical side is not run as a democracy, but is a top star system to minimize dup loops risk. We will have connected the following regions next week: - Israel, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Italy We are working with Switserland and Finland to get them going. Its not that easy because you need a few people to cooperate to get the mail in with bearable costs. Ok, 'nough said. I'll probably get the dutch sysops to send you kilo's of drop if you can help us with the zc problem. Route mail via 1:105/42 or direct. (v32 bis here). Cheers Henk ---------------- policy4 written before ZONES EXISTED. No eur nodes then! basic assumption behind (US) nets was "local dialing is free" doesnt exist in eur! Negates the rationale. ZC/RC relationship is intentionally contrived and is obviously invalid no matter how many places its written down.