RFC 1429 (rfc1429) - Page 2 of 8

Listserv Distribute Protocol

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