Subj : Binkley - no modem
To : Bob Jones
From : Mike Luther
Date : Sun Jan 13 2002 02:57 pm
Bob ..
BJ> Mike:
BJ> If you would like to suppliment your protocols by
BJ> adding BinkP support, just ask me.... Adding BinkP
BJ> support to an existing OS/2 Binkley based setup is
BJ> real easy.... :)
I might take you up on that, but answer me a question?
When I first looked into this deal of BinkP, I noticed that I think I recall
that it has a sort of a separate 'nodelist' and directory structure for
outbound and so on. As I first think I saw all this, you create a separate
directory structure to handle the traffic. Then wherever something shows up in
it to mash in or out, it goes to work and does that.
My problem with this is that for what I needed outside the FidoNet realm,there
are a stack of systems that are built into the NodeList here as part of a .PVT
addition. That's a common way of doing things based on many years of watching
this and that. If there are changes in routing numbers and all that stuff,
distributing the necesary update to the .PVT file and having it auto-compile
for node addressing, where there is absolutely no capability at all to remotely
maintain any of these extraneous nodes, could and can be done with the TELNET
game and so on. But tooling up to do this with the BinkP game seemed just
destined for misery as I first saw this.
I grant you that the whole process of BinkP is better in some or perhaps many
ways! But what is your thought if you have to remotely maintain twenty or
thirty sites that nobody is ever there to help you and there are hundreds of
miles between them?
I think this sorta fell out this way for some very much bigger projects than
some people may know about. Unless I was told wrong, as part of the TELNET
game that went together YEARS ago in Texas for the Rural Medicine operation
State-wide, it all went together with TELNET, for example! That, on top of the
fact that it was serviced and .. I think, to a great degree, still on the
AS/400 game and now as it migrates upward into bigger and better IBM!
I did not know this at all until a couple months ago when that surfaced at the
Fido Net 382 meeting over in Austin which I went to!
We tend to gloss over distances now in Fido and so on. But it's easy not to
understand that there are some 254 counties in Texas. It is further from
Texarkana, Texas, to El Paso, Texas, than it is from Texarkana to
Chicago,Illinois! There are a TON of counties out there which are so empty and
underserved for communications, even yet today, that you still have to think
carefully about bandwidth and text-based only systems!
You've never lived until you try to ride a BMW R60 motorcycle from El Paso to
Austin through a fast moving cold front out there East of Fort Stockton. The
thunderstorm got so damned bad I literally couldn't see the edge of the
pavement even on a bike! So I finally pulled over and then watched the hail
get bigger and bigger and bigger - with no place to hide! In sheer panic I
finally laid the R60 down on its side and curled up under it to get out of the
golf ball sized hail and prayed and prayed it wouldn't get any bigger! As I
high time instrument aircraft pilot, I really had more fear of that day in hail
than I've ever had upstairs in the Beech Baron's we had with radar in them!
Yes, it's a LONG way in Texas, just to check your mail in some places Bob!
And afterward - in the broiling sun, you have no idea how sweet the sagebrush
smells afterward out in the open like that until you've been there! So I have
to keep TELNET at the same time I consider BinkP!
I've managed to figure out, with a lot of help here, how to get a complete POTS
and TELNET dual task implementation of BINK running with a single dynamic
NodeList that does compile quite well and work for both tasks. That includes
dynamic splits between which nodes are POTS and which are TELNET that filter
out of cost-based decision routing in the QNODE.CFG that I use.
If you want to start a teaching course here on how to implement this in a
compatitble way to do it with a common NodeList and so on, so that I can
maintain my current working dual more creature, I would GLADLY pay attention to
you!!
I have learned more from Fido people, I think, than I've ever learned from the
Usenet pounding, although there are some VERY sharp and fine people there too!
--> Sleep well; OS/2's still awake! ;)
Mike @ 1:117/3001
--- Maximus/2 3.01
* Origin: Ziplog Public Port (1:117/3001)
