Favor request

Brian Behlendorf ([email protected])
Tue, 30 May 1995 13:35:48 -0700 (PDT)


Want to donate some CPU resources to the www-vrml effort, but don't want
to dedicate a huge amount of time? If you:

1) are root/postmaster on an internet site in a non-north-american
country
2) have fast connections to other machines in your geographical area
3) have sendmail-related resources to spare
4) are running an ESMTP-capable sendmail daemon.

then you can help. We're looking to reduce the www-vrml load on the machines
at wired, and one way to do this is to rewrite SMTP envelopes such that mail
bound for, say, 100 subscribers on 100 separate machines in Australia only
make one cross-pacific ESMTP hop rather than 100 separate hops. I currently
run this hack for a couple of lists at hyperreal, and it's incredibly
effective in reducing the load on the host both in CPU and bandwidth, and
doesn't create a huge load on the remote hosts either. It's 100%
transparant to all www-vrml recipients.

If you're willing to do this, send me mail with the name of your machine
and the coutry(ies) you're willing to redistribute for. For example, if
you are in Australia, it would also be good to offer to redistribute for
the half-dozen New Zealand www-vrml subscribers as well. Please, *only*
offer if you are the postmaster/root at your site and can handle the load.

For those who are interested in the details, here's how it works:
Let's say I have three addresses:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected].

A postmaster at x.au offers to be the reflector for all other .au hosts.
So, when mail is sent out to .au users, I rewrite the smtp envelopes
to send mail to

user%[email protected]
user%[email protected]
user%[email protected]

Sendmail on get.wired.com connects to x.au, dumps the addresses and the
message, and that's it. x.au then delivers user%x.au, and translates
user%y.au into [email protected] and user%z.au into [email protected], and delivers those.
Before, get.wired.com would have had to make three separate
transpacific sendmail connections. Obviously, this is only a win if the
reflector's local connections are faster than a long-distance connect
from get.wired.com.

Brian

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