FrontDoor

(31)    Thu 3 Oct 91  4.29      Rcvd: Fri 4 Oct  9.48
By: Pete Kvitek, JVD1BBS (2:5020/6)
To: tomas bremin
Re: hej
St: Pvt Kill Rcvd
------------------------------------------------------------
@INTL 2:270/7 2:5020/6
@MSGID: 2:5020/6 8a03fc9c
@REPLY: 2:270/7@fidonet.eu 8988e8ac
@PID: FM 2.02

Hi Tomas!

[other subjects discussed deleted]

 > WOW!  This was *VERY* exciting news to us!  I can
 > immediately see a nice part of a future brochure
 > describing your use of our product.  :-)  Will you
 > allow us to print that?

Sure... we will be lucky to!

 > Would you be willing to help
 > me with some facts (i.e. how many nodes were hooked
 > up, how many messages were sent, etc)?  What did the
 > communication mean to the people outside Moscow who
 > couldn't get information elsewhere?  And so on..

This friday we'll have a Moscow sysops meeting -- i'll ask everybody to provide
you with more detailed info about their board operation. My board activities
can be shortly described like this:

On Aug 19 I disabled all file transfers and all messages areas but SU.POL  --
this is all union echo mail area. Tossing/packing in all other areas was
disabled as well. Mailer was set to the every second hour mail only mode. Then
I start calling out voice all my fellow sysops in Moscow and other places i
could reach asking them to do the same and poll me. That was my job as a 2:5020
NC... Approx. 2/3 boards were unable to make long distance calls (probably
because the chiefs of theirs phone stations were following decrees of those
putchists). So this boards were set up to collect info from Moscovites and
provide them with the latest news through the echo mail they got making the
local calls.  Others were set up mail only to make long distance connections.
Mine were Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk and Chelyabinsk.
This covers pretty big area i must say.

Everything worked fine 'till the night 20/21 Aug -- at this time the
connections were cut one by one -- this was a big time for one FrontDoor
feature: "Alt-B/F6-Change Destination" At 11am on 21 all long distance
connections were back again.

All this continued for 72 sleeples hours -- my girlfriend typed in reports told
by various people to my answering machine, i was transferring this info and
reports sent to my internet address by RIA (Russian Info Agency) and InterFax
guys, and from all other people all other a world who sent words of support and
CNN reports -- all this went to the FidoNet -- the only free of charge publicly
available service available.

It's hard to estimate the real number of messages passed through the 5020/6 --
a lot of them where dupes, not in the sence of echo mail, but messages with the
same info or a report genereted from different boards. Since there was no way
to check who knows what the only way for everyone was to pump in all the info
s/he got so far...

I would say that the number of really different messages passed through 5020/6
would be something around 300-400 with the total amount 1342...

The FrontDoor mailer prooved to be extrimely flexible and reconfigurable. Can
you imagine to set up a new network configuration for approx. 20-30 nodes
spread out across 1/6 of the globe under the stress of the goverment putch?

I can't... but now I know for sure that this can be done with FrontDoor.

All the best,

> Pete

@Via FrontDoor 2:20/211@FidoNet, Oct 3 1991 at 8.00
@Via Ping 2:201/329@fidonet, Oct 3 1991 at 06:11 UTC
@Via MsgTrack+ 2:512/1@fidonet, Fri Oct 04 1991 at 01:30 UTC