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News from:
M V C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , I n c .
P.O. Box 4963
Manchester, NH 03108-4963
(603) 429-2223
June 1992
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found
on mv in the public archive; look in /news2/pub/mv/inews.
MV to offer dialup IP connections
We have recently added a provision in our agreement with NEARnet
that will allow us to provide dialup IP services (e.g. SLIP and PPP).
Dialup IP will provide you with a direct Internet connection over a
highspeed modem. During the time you are connected, you can do FTP
transfers, telnet to remote systems, and access many other Internet
services. We have not yet worked out the details, but please contact
us if you are interested.
Modem Upgrade Begins
MV has recently put online two Telebit Worldblazer modems in
place of two of the Telebit Trailblazer+ modems. In addition to stan-
dard 1200 and 2400 baud and 14,400 baud PEP mode supported by the TB+,
the WorldBlazer also features V.32/V.32bis and a new TurboPEP from
Telebit which boasts speeds of up to 23000 bps. Eventually all of the
modems on the main hunt group will be WorldBlazers, but for now you
can access the two at the end of the hunt group by calling 603-429-
2339.
You may find that the Worldblazer takes longer to connect in PEP
mode than the Trailblazer+ does; this may be helped by increasing the
value of your S7 register from its default of 40 to, say, 60 seconds.
One other glitch is that the Worldblazer sometimes doesn't understand
the first character received (e.g., the first letter of your login
sequence!). To get around this, you can expand your chat script to
send a return after the first "login:" prompt. This will result in
another login prompt, and you can continue the chat script as before.
News and mail on MSDOS
Up until now, we've managed to stay pretty much ignorant of how
to use an MSDOS system as a UUCP station. With some prodding from
people who wanted to know, and some help from those who did, we have
been experimenting with UUCP news and mail on MSDOS systems, and our
findings illustrate that this is quite practical. We report experi-
ence with a number of packages, all of which are online at MV (see the
ls-lR file, or email us for details).
uupc11q (UUPC/Extended version 11q, by Drew Derbyshire) provides
the basics of UUPC for PCs, including the transport program (uucico);
some utilities for copying files, getting status, and so forth; and a
fairly functional mail program. The package, though incomplete in its
documentation, is easy to install and supports domain addressing and
connections to multiple systems.
snews ("stable" version 1.12 by John McCombs and "alpha" version
1.90 by Michael Studte and John Dennis) is a package that adds usenet
news capability to a basic uupc implementation. It includes news
database maintenance facilities (for receiving, unbatching, indexing,
storing, and expiring messages) as well as a rudimentary newsreader.
The user interface program allows reading as well as posting of mes-
sages, and although primitive compared to some UNIX-based readers, is
pretty easy to get along with.
cmm (Cinetic Mail Manager by Cinetic Systems) is a shareware pro-
duct ($30) from Cinetic Systems. Formerly known as WinMail and as
EZ-Mail, it implements a very nice mail program for Microsoft Windows,
and can run in conjunction with any of a number of base UUCP packages
(including uupc11q).
Internet Survey Factoids
Four times a year, SRI International runs a survey on Internet
hosts that are addressable by name. This is called the ZONE (Zealot
Of Name Edification) survey, and, done in accordance with RFC1296, was
originally undertaken to ease the transition from the host.txt phase
of the Internet (where each host had to have a list of all other hosts
that it wanted to access) to the BIND phase (where host and domain
names are resolved through a distributed nameserver system). It was
thought that the ZONE survey could provide up-to-date host.txt lists
as the network grew, but was never actually used for that purpose.
Instead, it has been used as a sort of a census vehicle.
Some facts from the April 1992 ZONE survey:
There are 890,000 hosts on the Internet (up from 727,000 in the
January survey) and approximately 20,000 domains. The most populous
top-level domain is .EDU, with 284,500 hosts; second is .COM with
217,964.
The most common hostname is "venus", with 434. Next is "pluto"
(413), followed by "mars" (382), "pc1" (348), "zeus" (338), "jupiter"
(334), "saturn" (329), "mac1" (322), "mac2" (310), and "mercury"
(308). Also very popular are "snoopy," "hal," "hobbes," and "bart."
On a surprising note, at least to us, there are 8 hosts named
"mv."
A few of the ZONE files have been placed in /news2/pub/mv/ZONE on
mv and will be there for few weeks. 'report.9204' is the April sum-
mary; hosts.top.Z is a list of frequencies of all hostnames that occur
at least twice (this is a 200K+ file); rfc1296.txt explains ZONE.
Standard Stuff -- Things to remember about MV
+ For new referals we will credit a small finder's fee to your
account, equal to half of the new client's monthly service rate.
+ MV maintains an archive of files related to UUCP and networking,
and of files of recent interest. This archive is in /news2/pub
on mv; a directory (updated nightly) is in the file
/news2/pub/ls-lR, with a compressed version of /news2/pub/ls-
lR.Z.
+ ClariNet news is accessible from MV. ClariNet is a profession-
ally provided information source that uses the usenet news method
of distribution. ClariNet includes "real" news from UPI, indus-
try news, feature columns, and so forth. There are many sub-
scription packages, some are described in files in the directory
/news2/pub/mv/clarinet on mv; contact 1-800-USE-NETS for more
info. You can also receive the newsgroup biz.clarinet.sample for
samples of ClariNet articles.
+ If you are having problems, please let us know.
Thank you for your patronage.