Subj : It seems there are various different ideas floating around: To : All From : John Dovey Date : Thu May 27 2021 12:49 am Glad to see you, All! It seems there are various different ideas floating around: 1. Are the nodes you are delivering mail to up or not? 2. What is the traffic load for Echomail between systems 3. What are the routes that Echomail and Netmail are taking between node? 4. What is the relative traffic between those nodes. 5. Are the systems in the Nodelist up and responding to the services they advertise (Bink??? etc) 6. Is the Nodelist a "List of BBS Systems"? If so, what services do they offer? eg Telnet (port?), SSH (Port?, Rlogin (Port?), USENET News, etc It makes sense that some of those things you can monitor by watching the traffic on your own site. As suggested, those sites which don't accept mail are most likely down, obviously, and the volume of traffic on the echomail groups can be measured as it moves through your own system. What this doesn't tell you is whether you should even try to deliver mail to (or more importantly via) a particular system. It also makes it a wild assed guess about what traffic load is passing between other nodes, although the seenby and path kludges can give you a little info to inform your guess. Relying on your outbound directory as a "monitor" means you are only monitoring the sites you send mail to. I'm guessing that the PING/TRACE flags in the nodelist are sysops giving explict permission to send netmail to them to find out exactly this info.. as well as the path taken. The spec suggests that each system along the route is supposed to report back safe arrival of the mail. I haven't tested this yet so I'm not terribly sure how it works. As far as I'm aware, pinging any address on the network is entirely acceptable. Using some sort of ping for the host being reachable shouldn't be at all controversial. Pinging specific ports on the other hand can often be interpreted as potentially hostile if done too aggressively, but no-one who has any computer attached to the internet should be surprised when this happens. Running through the nodelist with echo-ping or the like to indicate that the system is alive would give at least the basic info that the host is up and reachable. The further points about what services the host provides. Synchronet already has something built in which figures that out and reports back to Vert with that info. If you look at his Systems list, it is reconfigured every night and goes so far as to do an automatic screen capture of the login screen. Take a squizz at https://synchro.net/sbbslist.html for that output. There are many ways to skin a cat. One other wild idea would be for sysops to run a utility on their side which reports their system info on a regular basis (so turn the scanning idea on it's head) sending out possibly UDP packets every 10 minutes to a server which collates them and presents the results. In theory, that could auto generate the nodelist automatically.. then the responsibility and initiative rests on the Sysop so there are no issues of security etc as what is exposed is entirely under the control of the Sysop. Monitoring traffic could also be done somehow like this, with the utility on the sysop's machine gathering the statistics and reporting them on a regular basis. Of course none of this need be live, but could be as a data packet sent to an echo which is machine readable to be picked up by whoever runs the software that can read these messages. I think it's just how we approach it which makes it doable or not. Deciding what the real need is, figuring out what the concerns are etc and addressing those. *** [Netmail-to-Telegram address: 474405162@2:460/256] .... Tag, you are IT! --- tg BBS v0.6.4 * Origin: Fido by Telegram BBS from Stas Mishchenkov (2:460/256) .