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| ;-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ******************************************************* ***** EARN Special Interest Group Announcement ****** ***** Call for volunteers ****** ******************************************************* 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 --------- 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@EARNCC.BITNET Volunteers are welcome to subscribe to the list. Send a mail message to LISTSERV@EARNCC with the string: "sub UFT-L Firstname Lastname" in the body of the message. d.