How does the gateway between "comp.unix.questions" and the

How does the gateway between "comp.unix.questions" and the


"info-unix" and "unix-wizards" are mailing list versions of
comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.wizards respectively.
There should be no difference in content between the
mailing list and the newsgroup.

To get on or off either of these lists, send mail to
info-unix-request@brl.mil or unix-wizards-request@brl.mil.
Be sure to use the '-Request'. Don't expect an immediate response.

Here are the gory details, courtesy of the list's maintainer,
Bob Reschly.

==== postings to info-UNIX and UNIX-wizards lists ====

Anything submitted to the list is posted; I do not moderate
incoming traffic -- BRL functions as a reflector. Postings
submitted by Internet subscribers should be addressed to the list
address (info-UNIX or UNIX- wizards); the '-request' addresses
are for correspondence with the list maintainer [me]. Postings
submitted by USENET readers should be addressed to the
appropriate news group (comp.unix.questions or
comp.unix.wizards).

For Internet subscribers, received traffic will be of two types;
individual messages, and digests. Traffic which comes to BRL
from the Internet and BITNET (via the BITNET-Internet gateway) is
immediately resent to all addressees on the mailing list.
Traffic originating on USENET is gathered up into digests which
are sent to all list members daily.

BITNET traffic is much like Internet traffic. The main
difference is that I maintain only one address for traffic
destined to all BITNET subscribers. That address points to a list
exploder which then sends copies to individual BITNET
subscribers. This way only one copy of a given message has to
cross the BITNET-Internet gateway in either direction.

USENET subscribers see only individual messages. All messages
originating on the Internet side are forwarded to our USENET
machine. They are then posted to the appropriate newsgroup.
Unfortunately, for gatewayed messages, the sender becomes
"news@brl-adm". This is currently an unavoidable side-effect of
the software which performs the gateway function.

As for readership, USENET has an extremely large readership - I
would guess several thousand hosts and tens of thousands of
readers. The master list maintained here at BRL runs about two
hundred fifty entries with roughly ten percent of those being
local redistribution lists. I don't have a good feel for the
size of the BITNET redistribution, but I would guess it is
roughly the same size and composition as the master list.
Traffic runs 150K to 400K bytes per list per week on average.


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