Date   : Thu, 18 Sep 1986 20:16:00 MDT
From   : WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA
Subject: Recent changes to the Archive Server

For those of you who missed the announcement, send a message to
ARCHIVE-REQUEST@SIMTEL20 which contains the one line: SEND INFO
in the message body.  Please do not send to ARCHIVE-SERVER via your
reply mechanism as it ends up in my mailbox and delays processing of
your requests.

I have made a couple of changes in the Server.  The first is that you
will no longer need to remember to quote certain characters in
filenames which are "special" characters to TOPS-20.  The Server now
does that for you, except for the slash ("/") character, and I expect
that to be fixed shortly.  (That means that any file with a slash in
the filename will show up as Not Found for now.)

The second change is to block certain extremely large files from being
processed in their original form.  These files are available from
other sources, as are most of the files we keep here.

In the two weeks since the availability of this service was announced,
we have processed just over 2,800 requests.  About 200 of those were
requests for the basic HELP, INFO, and BOOTSTRAP files.  About 260
were for filenames that didn't exist for one reason or another, and
about 300 resulted in multi-part replies.  The remaining 2,100
requests were answered with one message file in reply.  Of those, only
200 were for directory listings; the remaining 1,900 requests were for
actual files.

This is certainly a very active rate, and far greater than I
anticipated.  But, then again, I had no way to even guess the rate.
We seem to be able to tolerate the additional load to a point.
However, I still am considering a less responsive frequency and push
the processing back to nights and weekends.  This may happen without
warning, especially after other groups receive the notice that this
service is available...

--Frank