[4956] in Kerberos
Is rtfm.mit.edu "common knowledge? It should be! (was Re: FAQ for Kerberos)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Mon Apr 10 11:30:12 1995
To: kerberos@MIT.EDU
Date: 10 Apr 1995 15:12:37 GMT
From: jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan I. Kamens)
In article <3m70pk$22l@kerby.ocsg.com>, dennisg@news-srvr.CyberSAFE.COM (Dennis Glatting) writes:
|> In article <3lu8ie$4ff@pad-thai.cam.ov.com>,
|> Jonathan I. Kamens <jik@cam.ov.com> wrote:
|> >You did know that virtually ally Usenet FAQs are available in /pub/usenet on
|> >rtfm.mit.edu, right?
|>
|> That is not common knowledge. It is common practice, however,
|> for FAQ maintainers to post FAQs to news.answers on a monthly
|> basis.
Perhaps you and I have a different definition of "common knowledge". In the
past eight hours, over 3,170 FAQ files have been transferred via anonymous FTP
from rtfm.mit.edu, even ignoring the sites that retrieved over 100 files (and
are therefore probably running a mirror or some sort of gateway). That's 400
requests an hour. And that's a pretty slow day for rtfm.mit.edu (which makes
sense, since it's Monday morning). In the same time, 567
mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu requests for FAQ files have been processed, which is
70 per hour. It looks to me like quite a large number of people know about
rtfm.mit.edu.
Furthermore, rtfm.mit.edu is the primary and official archive site for
news.answers, and it's documented in the "Introduction to the *.answers
newsgroups" posting which appears monthly in all the *.answers newsgroups and
in news.announce.newusers.
(Stepping on soapbox....)
My point is that anyone who posts to the Usenet should read the new-user
postings in news.announce.newusers before doing so, and anyone who reads the
new-user postings in news.announce.newusers should know that FAQ postings are
posted in *.answers and archived on rtfm.mit.edu.
Followups directed to news.newusers.questions.
--
Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@cam.ov.com
