Editorial

Broken Filebone
Doug Myers

Welcome to the first edition of Fidonews in the year 2000. Hopefully, you all will be getting a copy of this millennium edition, because there are at least two barriers to distribution right now.

The first is with my system. I was overjoyed when the year 2000 rolled over and the mail I wrote appeared to be correctly dated, the old copy of Front Door 2.02 appeared to move it just fine, and the computer was still up. Then I discovered that the external utility used to post Fidonews to the FIDONEWS echo incorrectly dated the mail. Fortunately, Peter Karlsson's Azure 300 utility correctly dates the messages used to post Fidonews, so we'll give it a try for a while.

The second is that the FILEBONE appears to be broken in the middle. Ever since the NAB and the Z1B established a new link (Matt Bedynek/Ken Wilson) to replace the old link (John Souvestre/George Peace), some or all FILEBONE files haven't been flowing back and forth. Two weeks ago, I began distributing Fidonews through John Souvestre, who promptly distributed it to the systems associated with the Z1B. Bob Seaborn noticed Fidonews was not showing up on the NAB side, so he FTP'd a copy from Souvestre's system and distributed it. Until the FILEBONE is repaired, I'll be crashing a ticked copy of Fidonews to both John Souvestre and Bob Seaborn, both of whom have bent over backwards to keep Fidonews flowing.

Theoretically, the FILEBONE is a seperate entity from any of the echomail backbones. However, files have traditionally followed echomail paths at the zone distribution level. I'm not sure why Matt and Ken have changed that - I've not had an opportunity to discuss it with either - but there's nothing but tradition and the spirit of cooperation to make them move files along with echomail. Here's hoping that they either agree to move files or the FILEBONE sets up an alternative path.