To: Subject: Welcome to the Big-Internet list From: Big-Internet-Request@munnari.OZ.AU Reply-To: Big-Internet-Request@munnari.OZ.AU -------- Welcome to the Big-Internet list. This list is intended to discuss issues related to the growth of the Internet, including particularly the problems with IP addressing and routing that this growth entails. Messages for the list (which is a simple reflector, not moderated or edited) should be sent to Big-Internet@munnari.OZ.AU Requests to be added to, or deleted from, the list, and other administrivia, should be sent to (and ONLY to) Big-Internet-Request@munnari.OZ.AU Big-Internet is also available in digest form. Digest messages are sent once a day each day in which messages appear on the list. The digest contains the same messages as the regular list (occasionally trash messages may be deleted, but no guarantee) though with minimal headers. The digest is not particularly suitable for active participation in the list, replying to messages in the digest is not easy - if you plan on participating, remain on the immediate redistribution list where you have been placed unless you expressly asked for the digest form. On the other hand, if you're likely to mostly just watch what is happening, then the digest form may be more convenient. Send requests to swap from one form of the list to the other to Big-Internet-Request@munnari.OZ.AU. Please be patient, this list is operated by a human, who occasionally sleeps, attends conferences, and does other stuff like that. Requests can take a while to be acted upon sometimes (a while may be more than a week). All requests are acknowledged when processed, if you don't receive an ack after a reasonable delay, feel free to resend your request. Please save this message, messages sent to the list with content like "How do I get off this list" or "Unsubscribe me" are not welcome. Further, if you send something like that, and you catch me in a bad mood, you may end up with twice as many copies of every message as you were getting before... If you look closely, you may see the address owner-Big-Internet@munnari.OZ.AU in various places. That address is useful only for mailers to send bounce messages at. There is no guarantee that messages sent to that address will end up anywhere but a black hole. Archives of previous discussions on the list (which everyone is encouraged to survey, before contribution) can be found on munnari.OZ.AU [128.250.1.21] in the directory big-internet/list-archive Archives of traffic from previous months will be found in files named YYYY-MM-Mon (as in 1991-07-Jul), traffic from the current month will be located in the file "current". This list was created in July 1991. Months are defined to begin at 00:00 on the first of each month, local time, Melbourne, Australia. Missing archive files indicate months in which there was no traffic. Some older archives are compressed. Reading the archives, or at least some of them, is highly recommended. The digests are not archived - digest contents are identical to the regular list, simply fetch the regular archive and read the messages from it. Other files, contributed documents, etc, may be found in the big-internet directory, or sub-directories of it, as notified from time to time. Files to be placed in that directory may be packaged in some convenient form and mailed to Big-Internet-Request@munnari.OZ.AU or may be dropped, by anonymous FTP, in the "tmp" directory on munnari.OZ.AU, along with a short message to the above address so I know to move them to the appropriate place. Please note - this list can be VERY busy at times, while being dormant at others, if you can't handle large volumes of (usually) fairly technical e-mail, you may not want to remain on here. Some sites choose to relay Big-Internet into a local usenet style newsgroup for ease of reading by many local recipients. That's fine. However it is an absolute rule of Big-Internet that NO news system ever take news "postings" and send them to the Big-Internet list. If you are reading this message via a news system, please note that the only way to send messages to the list is via mail, sending news "followups" will see your message only relayed to a very small subset of all normal recipients. NB: making a news system treat B-I as a "moderated" group, so postings are all automatically mailed is NOT a suitable way of implementing this policy, news postings must not ever be sent to the list, any way at all. Robert Elz kre@munnari.oz.au