A Scheme to Partition Grex

Nov 22 03:09 UTC 1996

I believe that Grex needs to be significantly restructured.

The odds are good that we will soon be able to quadruple the speed of our net
connection and also greatly increase the speed of our CPU.

THE PROBLEM is that if we do this, then six months from now we will have
  (1) Grex just as slow as it is now
  (2) About the same amount of conference activity as we have now
  (3) About the same number of members as we have now
  (4) Four times as much email traffic as we have now.

This is OK, in a way.  Email is not evil, and providing more email to more
people is not a bad thing.  But I don't think it is what most of us have in
mind.  For most of the people who are active in the Grex community, and who
donate money to Grex, the place where they'd like to see improvements in
performance and activity is in the conferencing (including party).  The
problem is that everytime we allocate more resources to Grex, they get soaked
up by more Email usage.  

Computer conferencing is beginning to get much more attention and visibility.
Check out Electronic Minds (http://www.minds.com) Howard Reingold's new
free web conferencing system.  It was hyped enthusiastically in Newsweek.  It
was launched with big donations from Sun and Netscape.  It has glitzy graphics
and buggy software (Well Engaged, another Picospan inspired web conferencing
system).  Behind all the hype and excitement about the brave new world of
virtual communities that Howard just invented, they are pretty much doing what
we've been doing for more than a decade. (Except not in a communally governed
sort of way.  No telling who governs.  Netscape and Sun, I guess.)

So we could take the people who flock to these new places and show them Grex,
and they would say "Wow!  Grex sure is slow."

Slow?  That's it?  That's the dominant impression that we make on users? 
That's really sad.  We should be so much more than that.

We can offer the standard excuse: "So long as we are free, we will always be
slow."  But that's at best half true.  Electronic Minds is free.  Utne Cafe
is free.  Neither one is slow.  Really taking part in a virtual community is
work, it takes a lot of commitment.  The demand for that isn't anywhere near
as bottomless as the demand for free Email.

We've often said that it is OK that Grex is slow.  We aren't trying to provide
first-class service.  I think that's true, but not for all services.  I think
we'd like to come much closer to providing a first-class conferencing service
than we do now.

THE SOLUTION, I believe can be modelled on the way we now handle disk space:
with partitions.  Mail has a partition.  The conferences have a partition.
Users have a parition.  No matter how much mail we get, there will always
be plenty of disk space left for the conferences, because disk resources
are partitioned.  We can decide administratively how we want to allocate
disk resources between mail and conferencing and user's personal file
space.

I believe that we must somehow redesign Grex so that that our other key
resources, network bandwidth and cpu, are also partitioned.  With this
kind of system we could decide what our priorities are and where we
want to place our resources.

We could set things up so that even when we are flooded with mail
deliveries and users running mail, to the point where the computer
groans under the strain, the conferencing system would still be quick
and responsive, because it would have resources reserved for it that
mail couldn't encroach on.

This doesn't mean restricting Email.  On the contrary, I think we could
do things like allowing POP access to our mail, because that access
would only be competing with other mail access, not encroaching on
conferencing or any other Grex activities.  Thus a partition scheme would mean
that we don't have to be shy about offering mail access because it isn't a
threat to us anymore.

AN EXAMPLE of how this might be set up is to actually use two seperate
computers with separate internet connections.  I hope people can come
up with better implementations, but this is the best I've thought of
so far:

  - We'd have two separate computers, call them grex.cyberspace.org
    and edna.cyberspace.org (after Edna O'Brian, whose books have
    mysteriously been hanging around the dungeon and the pumpkin since
    time inmemoriable).  Edna would be the mail machine.

  - All Grex logins would work on both machines.  (Kerberos, maybe.)

  - Each computer would have its own internet connection.  Maybe a 28.8K
    link each, or an ISDN line each, or one of each.

  - All mail sent to cyberspace.org would be routed to Edna.  No mail
    would ever pass over the Grex machine's link.  Ditto for sent mail.

  - It would not be possible to read mail from Grex.  You'd have to
    log in to Edna to do so.  It might be possible to send mail *from*
    Grex (such mail would be routed over our local net to Edna and
    sent out from there.

  - Dial-in users would, when they first connect, be asked if they
    want to log into Grex or Edna the Mail Machine.  This would be
    done by some kind of terminal server.  Users could drop out from
    one machine and log into the other.  Grex members could telnet
    from Grex to Edna (since they can telnet anywhere).  I don't know
    if we'd allow anyone to telnet out of Edna.

  - Telnet users would have to telnet into one machine or the other.
    The ones going to the mail machine would always come in over the
    mail connection, the same one sent and received mail goes over.
    The two machines would have separate telnet queues.

I think this is a reasonably good scheme that would help Grex accomplish its
mission in a much more effective way.  I hope it can be improved on.

What do you thing?

response 2 of 121:

Nov 22 09:00 UTC 1996

I think it's an excellent plan.  The biggest impediment I can see,
from a financial/organizational view, is getting two different Internet
links set up.

It should be okay for people to send mail from Grex to Edna, IMHO.

response 4 of 121:

Nov 22 15:54 UTC 1996

We could also pretty easily write programs that would print "You have new
mail" type messages on Grex when new mail arrives for you on Edna, so you
could go over there and read it.

response 6 of 121:

Nov 22 17:21 UTC 1996

A fine idea and a necessary one...if email is put off on a separate computer
I wonder if it would be more practical then to offer POP?

response 8 of 121:

Nov 22 23:32 UTC 1996

Great plan Janc and well thought out!

response 10 of 121:

Nov 23 02:15 UTC 1996

  It's not certain that our arrangement with IC-Net for a 28.8 Kbps line
could be continued if we got another, faster Internet source.  You can
definitely make two separate calls with one ISDN line, so with two ISDN
adapters on our end, it would that would work (it might even work with
one ISDN terminal adapter, depending on how it works).  But that approach
could lead to inefficient bandwidth utilization, where the 64 Kbps
connection for Grex might be jammed and lagging, while the mail connection
might only be using 32 Kbps, leaving 32 Kbps unused.
 
  Another possible approach to allocate bandwidth might be to have a
single 128 Kbps connection, but connect Edna or Grex to our Ethernet via
a serial line connected to a router.  The speed of the serial line can
easily be adjusted in software (e.g., 19.2, 38.4, or 57.6 Kbps), which
would limit the maximum bandwidth that system could use.  Unfortunately
it doesn't reserve a minimum, so if the faster-connected system is really
loaded, it still affects the serial-connected system.  It might also be
worthwhile to modify the ppp software on Edna or Grex to limit their
bandwidth consumption by themselves.  It's certainly possible, though it
could prove pretty difficult.  (By the way, I oppose the name edna for
the mail server, for what it's worth.  This may be boring, but I think
"mail.cyberspace.org" would be a remarkably good name.  :-)
 
  If we get an ISDN line, can't keep the 28.8 Kbps line, and this split
occurs, I think it would be best to just share the ISDN line for a while,
to observe the bandwidth utilization of each system.

response 12 of 121:

Nov 23 19:29 UTC 1996

Re #10:  Neat.  I had suspected there might be better technical arrangments
possible.  The technical details in my proposal were meant as a proof of
feasibility and a point of departure.  I'm pleased to see better ideas.

Re #11:  I think we could grow a much better conferencing system, with more
energetic discussions on more topics if we could make the conferencing system
more attractive speed-wise and connectivity-wise.  The we *will* have people
who come here for the conferencing.

response 14 of 121:

Nov 23 21:11 UTC 1996

This sounds like a wonderful idea to me.  I agree with (Rob?) whoever it was
that said share the link at first, because I don't think we'll fill an isdn
for a while yet, and it would give us valuable data.  Anotehr idea is to
connect the link to a router that controls the incoming and or outgoing data
from each link.

response 16 of 121:

Nov 23 22:37 UTC 1996

I think that Jan has done it again.  I am 100% for 
this idea and would like to see it implemented as 
soon as possible.  (Let me know if there is any way 
you think I can help!!!)  

I am also quite positive that all of Mary's concerns 
can/will be met, since what services to offer to whom 
is purely an administrative decision. 

response 18 of 121:

Nov 24 13:26 UTC 1996

"Dial-in users would, when they first connect, be asked if they
 want to log into Grex or Edna the Mail Machine.  This would be
 done by some kind of terminal server.  Users could drop out from
 one machine and log into the other.  Grex members could telnet
 from Grex to Edna (since they can telnet anywhere).  I don't know
 if we'd allow anyone to telnet out of Edna."


 "Another thing that could be done would be to allow members to run POP
  versions of those mailers that have them here on Grex.  Then they could
  read mail on any system on the net that runs a POP server, such as
  nether.net or, if we choose to do so, Edna.  This would be a pretty
  minor member benefit.  Everyone could have mail accounts on Edna and
  connect to Edna either by telnetting there or running a POP client on
  their own computers.  Only members could run POP clients on Grex."

Small stuff but examples of membership-perk-creep.  Which is why
I asked if there was any solution which would avoid differentiating
between members and non-members.

response 20 of 121:

Nov 24 17:32 UTC 1996

This sounds like a great idea, but there is one *HUGE* problem with this 
that I could just not live with.  The name of the new machine would not 
start with the two letters "gr"!   :(   :(

response 22 of 121:

Nov 24 18:03 UTC 1996

Yes, if somebody wants to do the programming.  Not easily.

response 24 of 121:

Nov 24 18:56 UTC 1996

But nobody ever has a lot of time for this.. (At least this is usually 
the case for stuff like this)

Anyway, I think it's a good idea, except the name of the new computer 
just has to start with "gr" or I will be very upset.