RFC 1429 (rfc1429) - Page 2 of 8
Listserv Distribute Protocol
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1429 Listserv Distribute Protocol February 1993
satisfaction. In contrast, "test" and "debug" options can be used to
experiment with the protocol but should not be used for normal
operation because of the additional bandwidth and CPU time required
to generate the various informational reports.
Finally, it should be noted that the DISTRIBUTE protocol was
developed to address a number of issues, some of them relevant only
to BITNET, and has evolved since 1986 while keeping a compatible
syntax. For the sake of brevity, this RFC describes only a small
subset of the available options and syntax. This is why the syntax
may appear unnecessarily complicated or even illogical.
1. Selecting an entry point into the DISTRIBUTE backbone
The first thing you have to do is to find a suitable site to submit
your distributions to. For testing, and for testing ONLY, you can
use:
For production use, however, you should select a DISTRIBUTE site in
your topological vicinity: it would make no sense to pass your
distributions from California to a server in Sweden if most of your
recipients are in the US. If your organization is connected to BITNET
and your BITNET system is part of the DISTRIBUTE backbone, this ought
to be your best bet. Otherwise you will want to contact someone
knowledgeable about BITNET (or the author of this RFC if you have no
BITNET users). Make sure to run through the following checklist
before sending any production traffic to the site in question:
a. Do you have good connectivity to the host in question? Does the
host, in general, have decent BITNET connectivity? There are still
a few sites that insist on using 9.6k leased lines for BITNET in
spite of having T1 IP access. You will want to avoid them.
b. Send mail to the server with "show version" in the message body
(not in the subject field, which is ignored). Is the server running
version 1.7f or higher? If so, it should not have given you the
following warning,
>>> This server is configured to use PUNCH format for mail