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On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 10:20:37AM -0500, alandd@mindspring.com wrote:
> What is a netsplit?

With IRC, you can have more than one server serving the same set of
users.  These then connect to each other to form a network.  Some of the
bigger ones are EFNet, Undernet, DALNet, etc.  Freenode (formerly the
Open Projects Network) is a smaller IRC network, but commonly used in
the Free Software/Open Source community for collaborating on FS/OS
projects (as well as socializing, of course).  For example, the
irc.debian.org hostname is just a DNS alias for irc.openprojects.net.

A "netsplit" occurs when one server in an IRC network loses contact with
one of the servers with which it's communicating.  This causes some of
the users not to be able to communicate with the other users.  Consider
a two-server network, where the servers are called A and B.  If A and B
temporarily stop communicating (due to network congestion, or other
issues), users who are connected to server A won't be able to talk to
users who are connected to server B.  Make sense?

> What do you mean your logs join/quit spam?  You get spam from
> participating in IRC?

The word "spam" was being used in the sense of "something that is
repetitious", not "unsolicited bulk/commercial email".  What he was
saying is that the netsplits have been very frequent lately and so the
files to which he is recording his IRC sessions therefore have frequent
records of netsplits in them.

> Please turn on the light.  This area of the net is dark to me.

One site of which I've heard spoken is <http://www.irchelp.org/>,
although I've never really used it myself.  It looks to be
MS-Windows-oriented, at least as far as the software bits, but it seems
that there's also a good amount of general information there too.  HTH.

--=20
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"They that can give up  essential  liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."        -- Benjamin Franklin

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