5 Mar
2005
5 Mar
'05
6:30 p.m.
Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote:
One of the problems mail server admins face, are
people who throw up their
own mailserver at home. You don't have gobs of bandwidth, you don't have
multiple backup servers, and you don't have diesel generators and online
UPS. If you don't, you have no business running a public mailserver. Most of
the time I see this it's because someone wants some kinda juvenile bragging
rights about "Ohhh I run a my own K00L server". Geeze. I have seen a few
people who do it for good reason, but, if you run a mail server you need to
be a good net citizen about it.
Have you ever heard of the word SOVEREIGNTY? I run my own servers for
everything because I exercise my right to be totally independent from the
outside world. I'll keep running when the rest of the world explodes in
the thermonuclear holocaust.
What makes you think that you have the right to impose your elitism on the
rest of the world? Just because you are rich and snobby enough to have
gobs of bandwidth and redundant servers and all that, why in the hell should
everyone else? The Founding Fathers of ARPANET made it accessible to
everyone. I have the right to be a netizen even if my entire installation
consists of a single VAX-11/780. I *do* diligently maintain it, and it has
a very good uptime. But every Classic Computer needs hardware maintenance
occasionally, and if it is acceptable to everyone at my site to have occasional
downtime, what right do YOU have to impose on us that we have to spend millions
of dollars on redundancy that we don't need?
We are concerned with *CLASSIC* computers here. It is extremely hypocritical
of you to shut me out because I run my entire operation on CLASSIC hardware
with CLASSIC software in the CLASSIC manner, using business practices of
the CLASSIC computing era, exactly as it was done on ARPA Internet in 1980s.
Hell, I actually have more bandwidth at this facility that most ARPANET sites
had: I have 384 kbps SDSL and they only had 56 kbps. I run my VAX servers
just as diligently as UC Berkeley ran theirs, but demanding the level of
performance you are asking for is absolutely and totally outlandish,
extravagant and orders of magnitude over the threshold of socially
unacceptable.
What does being a good net citizen admin entail?
It entails following standards. RFC 1123, Requirements for Internet Hosts,
says that you must retry mail for 4 days because the recipient has the
*RIGHT* to run a mail server that may occasionally go down for a day.
MS