Special Interest Group Announcement

[Daniele Bovio <HI%FRORS12.BITNET@localhost]

Folks,
      I would really appreciate to have your contribution in
this work we are starting out. The purpose of the group is
entirely positive, no religious wars accepted, ;-)

Regards

PS Remember to store your maps| ;-)
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       *****  EARN Special Interest Group Announcement  ******
       *****            Call for volunteers             ******
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An EARN Special Interest Group, open  to all, is started to define the
protocol of an unsolicited file transfer mechanism similar to SENDFILE
for the  Internet. The goal  is to  have a powerful,  generic protocol
able to  support VM, VMS,  and UNIX  file systems, finalized  within a
year at  most. Once the protocol  is defined it will  be published and
implementers will be encouraged to provide a working prototype. If the
prototypes proves to work, the protocol will be submitted as an RFC to
the Internet. Volunteers are welcome to join the group and participate
in the definition phase.

RATIONALE
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It seems  to be  wise to start  thinking about the  future of  the key
EARN/BITNET services in order to be able to preserve them even without
NJE. After  all, sendfile services  not requiring the  availability of
NJE would be immediately valuable,  particularly in those parts of the
world (UK, Australia) where NJE is not used at all.

This  appears  of  particular  importance  if  applied  to  distribute
services. In theory,  it does not seem difficult to  base the exchange
of  distribution jobs  between pairs  of LISTSERVs  on SMTP  transport
(using base64  encoding for  binary files) rather  than NJE.  There is
already a  prototype version of  LISTSERV that can provide  the entire
range of LISTSERV  services without NJE (peered lists,  list of lists,
automatic command  forwarding, but of course  not interactive messages
or delivery of arbitrary binary files which today are not available on
the  Internet). In  practice,  however,  it is  difficult  to build  a
service with  the same  level of reliability  using SMTP  as transport
mechanism, because of the lack of reliability of certain mail gateways
and because  of the problem of  message size limits (most  SMTP relays
reject  messages larger  than 100k).  The prototype  Internet LISTSERV
requires  that  the  two  VM  systems  can  establish  a  direct  SMTP
connection  (no MX  or  intermediate gateway),  and  assumes that  the
message  size  limit  is  high   enough  not  to  cause  rejection  of
LISTSERV-to-LISTSERV  traffic.  This  is reasonable  for  a  prototype
service,  but a  full  production  service would  need  a more  robust
solution. Because LISTSERV is not  the only application which may need
to  send  files larger  than  100k  and  containing binaries  to  peer
servers, this solution should not be  implemented in LISTSERV but as a
layered service  similar to the NJE  SENDFILE, which could be  used by
anyone.

Thus,  an EARN  Special Interest  Group, open  to all,  is started  to
define the protocol of an  unsolicited file transfer mechanism similar
to SENDFILE for the Internet. The protocol will become public domain.

The group will work through the mailing list:

                   UFT-L@localhost

Volunteers are welcome  to subscribe to the list. Send  a mail message
to LISTSERV@localhost with the string:  "sub UFT-L Firstname Lastname" in
the body of the message.

                                                 d.