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[OM] Bringing back the eSIF: Theory and Practice

Subject: [OM] Bringing back the eSIF: Theory and Practice
From: Garth Wood <garth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 16:54:25 -0700
Well, there appear to be other than technical problems in bringing the eSIF 
back.

Our downstream ISP is now limiting the outbound traffic of our server farm to 
approx. 10 KBytes/sec.  Seems like we weren't the *only* ones to notice the 
several-orders-of-magnitude increase in traffic that was choking off our pipe.  
This is not good, and I don't mean from the point of view of the eSIF or those 
of you who want it back in all its glory for free -- my (not to mention my 
partners') act of generosity in hosting the eSIF will now probably cost us more 
$$$ if we want a reasonable upload capacity back for the entire server farm 
(and we *do* want that capacity back, for other reasons altogether).  Needless 
to say, my partners are less than totally happy with me, and there's going to 
be some financial ramifications.

No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

Well, here are some options, in rough order of decreasing preference from my 
point of view:

1. We encourage the whiners on the List and elsewhere (you *know* who you are) 
to suck it up and buy the damn CD -- after all, it's only $23.00 U.S. including 
shipping, and you obviously can't live without it, even though you seem to 
think that others should perform thousands of hours of work just so you can 
avoid the $23.00 U.S. expenditure.  To which I say "TANSTAAFL," and leave it at 
that.  ("But information just wants to be free!"  Yeah, right.  So why the Hell 
does it cost so much to generate it in the first place?)  

2. We encourage Olympus America or Olympus Japan (or whoever in the Olympus 
group) to host the eSIF, either in whole or in part.  Perhaps the deal we could 
make is that *all* administration would be taken on by one or more members of 
the List (with Hans having veto rights over any decision, since it's his baby), 
and we police the site so that there are no further "pigs at the trough" 
issues.  This would probably be a delicate negotiation, and from Oly's point of 
view, I can't really see why they'd do it.  But who knows?  We'd definitely 
need a "point-man" (or "point-woman") for this negotiation, and I'm thinking 
one or more of the Japanese Listmembers would be good choices...

3. We leave the central URL (www.e-sif.net) alone, and split the bulk of the 
actual content across AT LEAST half-a-dozen different sites, to try and avoid 
the bandwidth-sucking problem.  The central URL would do the appropriate link 
redirection.

3a. Further to above, the PDFs get removed, and we institute a "request" system 
whereby people register to get PDFs of interest sent to them in private e-mail. 
 That way we could limit the amount of PDFs that get sent out (say, two per 
person per month).

4. We try to re-establish the eSIF at a central site (I have a couple of 
possibilities) with throttling enabled.

5. We try various combinations of the above.

Ideas?  Thoughts?  Bouquets?  All brickbats will be appropriately dealt with 
(i.e., sent to /dev/null  8^> ).

Garth


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