Description of the changes for release 1.8b of LISTSERV(TM) ----------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1995 L-Soft international, Inc. May 14th, 1995 ************************************************************************* **************************** Executive notes **************************** ************************************************************************* The release notes for version 1.8b of LISTSERV(TM) have been split into three documents: executive notes, list owner's notes, and LISTSERV maintainer's notes. The present executive notes contains a brief description of the most significant changes in version 1.8b, information on new supported systems, new products and new licensing options, and a Product Development report. For more information about any of the changes described in the release notes, please write to SALES@LSOFT.COM or call us at +1 (301) 942-8886. ************** * Highlights * ************** - LISTSERV currently ported to 11 major unix(R) brands, OpenVMS(TM), Windows NT(TM) and Windows 95(TM)(*). - LISTSERV-TCP/IP product for VM allows a smooth migration from BITNET to TCP/IP on the same hardware. The migration procedure is very simple and takes about 4 hours for 100 lists. - Graduated and Limited licenses (now available for VM) significantly reduce cost of ownership and TCP/IP migration for smaller sites. - "SMTP controller" paradigm for VM sites: offload the resource intensive SMTP deliveries from your VM system to an inexpensive "SMTP controller" machine, transparently to your users. Hardware and operating system costs for a workload of up to 250,000 daily deliveries (weekday average) can be as low as US$6,000, with yearly license and maintenance costs of US$550 only (academic/US prices; hardware prices may vary in other countries). - New LISTSERV High Performance product ("LISTSERV-HPO") for very large workloads. LISTSERV-HPO can comfortably drive lists in excess of 100,000 subscribers with subsecond response times - on a personal computer. - New LSMTP(TM) product announced: expected to process 1-1.5 million deliveries a day on a midrange workstation with 128M. Refer to separate announcement for more information. (*) For legal reasons, we may not sell the Windows 95(TM) version until this operating system is officially released. The software, however, has already been ported. ************************************************************************* ********************* Development Manager's message ********************* ************************************************************************* When we released version 1.8a of LISTSERV in December 1993, we were about to embark on a very ambitious venture: free LISTSERV from its dependence on mainframe hardware and on the NJE protocol, while preserving a high degree of compatibility and interoperability with the existing LISTSERV user base. Our original goal was to port LISTSERV to VMS(TM) and unix(R) by 1Q95, and to Windows NT(TM) by 4Q95. This was no easy task to start with, and with no industry precedent to support the feasibility of our porting plan, which did not require a complete rewrite or involve POSIX, there was serious concern among our customers that we would not succeed in overcoming the difficulties that laid ahead of us. Well, we had our doubts and crises, but we just grinded our teeth and pressed on. We had to work double shift for several months, but we made it, and the results far exceed our expectations. Today, LISTSERV is available for both VMS(TM) architectures, for 11 major unix(R) brands, for Windows NT(TM), for Windows 95(TM), and, of course, for VM. A MPE/iX version should become available soon, and we are considering a port to MVS and to the Macintosh(R). Many sites have already migrated to the new versions of LISTSERV. The largest list in the network, TOPTEN (over 73,000 subscribers), runs on a unix(R) LISTSERV. The 4th largest LISTSERV site is also a unix(R) server, and probably the largest unix(R) list manager in the network with over 2.1 million deliveries a week. We already support more unix(R) brands than some of the main competing products, and our unix(R) products perform better than systems that were specifically designed for unix(R) and that are not portable. LISTSERV now delivers about 10 million messages worldwide on an average business day, a threefold increase from the release of 1.8a in 4Q93. In fact, we expect these numbers to soar as the PC versions of LISTSERV are released and as Internet service providers start offering mailing lists to their customers. Naturally, we do not intend to rest on our laurels. The porting effort will continue throughout the year, as the database and some of the more advanced file server functions still have to be ported to non-VM systems. At the same time we will continue to improve the functionality and performance of LISTSERV to better meet the needs of new user groups. For instance, Internet service providers need to be able to run very large numbers of lists, whereas many of our corporate customers are planning to start electronic newsletters with target audiences in excess of 100,000 subscribers. Even though LISTSERV has always excelled in the area of performance, it was not able to meet the 50,000 daily subscriptions mark that some of our customers were expecting after a large advertisement campaign - at least not on inexpensive hardware. With the new High Performance version of LISTSERV, which is being released together with version 1.8b, you can run such lists even on a personal computer, and with sub-second response time. We are also working on two new products that will make it easier and cheaper for people to use LISTSERV. The first is a state of the art WWW interface, with support for many advanced functions such as management of list subscriptions on an individual user basis (similar to a graphical user interface, but with the advantage that it can be used from any operating system that supports WWW), and point-and-click list reconfiguration for list owners. We do not have a firm release date yet, but we have made good progress and expect that the beta will begin 3-4Q95. Our second new product is a high performance SMTP delivery program, called LSMTP(TM), which was specifically designed to handle very large volumes of mail and require as little maintenance and attention as possible, while implementing the latest SMTP protocol extensions. This product was developed through a partnership with Altmayer & Associates, a consulting firm headquartered in Bonn, Germany. LSMTP is already used in production by two of our customers, and is expected to be able to handle up to 1-1.5 million deliveries a day on a mid-range workstation with 128M of memory. LSMTP is particularly well suited to large announcement/newsletter lists because it handles massive message submissions very well. In under a minute, it will have opened 1,000 SMTP connections and will be delivering that many messages in parallel. Even normal lists will benefit from this degree of parallelism, of course. LSMTP is also ideally suited to Internet service providers, large campus mail servers, etc. Our goal and ambition is that, by 1Q96, it should be possible to run just about any LISTSERV workload on hardware costing under $10,000, and with point and click ease. Small businesses, K-12 schools, community colleges and other "low budget" organizations should be able to purchase a normal PC server, install LISTSERV and LSMTP, click through the configuration screens, and announce their first mailing list 30 minutes later, without ever having to worry about babysitting mail queues or getting patches for the security exposures of the month. Our customers are demanding "install and forget" solutions, and this will be one of our main areas of focus for the next 12 months. Eric Thomas Manager of Design & Development L-Soft international, Inc. ************************************************************************* ********************** BITNET to TCP/IP migration *********************** ************************************************************************* Many of our customers, including some of the largest LISTSERV sites, have successfully migrated to TCP/IP. As of 9505, 7 out of the top 20 sites in terms of volume delivered were already running LISTSERV-TCP/IP, and 8 out of the 20 largest LISTSERV lists were managed by TCP/IP servers. The migration procedures are now ironed out, and with our new licensing schemes for smaller sites and the research we have been doing on inexpensive mail delivery servers, migration costs are lower than they were a year ago. Perhaps the most visible outcome of this experience and research is that, whereas we had about a dozen offers and solutions last year, we can now handle 95% of cases with just two migration plans: one for sites that have decided to phase out VM, and one for sites that have long term plans for their mainframe systems. Plan number 1: VM system to be phased out within 12-18 months ------------------------------------------------------------- If you are planning to phase out your VM system, the only issue to be resolved is which system you want to migrate to (unix(R), VMS(TM), Windows NT(TM)), and when. In most cases these choices will already have been dictated by strategic management decisions; if you are hesitating between several possible operating systems, we will be pleased to assist you. In this scenario, you will need a LISTSERV license for the target operating system, hardware on which to run it, and, possibly, a maintenance contract for your existing VM license, depending on when exactly you intend to migrate. For moderate workloads (50,000 daily deliveries or less), you can usually run LISTSERV on an existing system. For larger workloads we recommend a dedicated machine. For your LISTSERV license, you have three options, depending on your workload, growth plans, procurement policy, and so on: 1. You can purchase a perpetual, unlimited capacity license, which comes with one year of warranty (new versions, bug fixes, technical assistance). From year 2, you purchase continued maintenance on a yearly basis, at your option. This is the traditional licensing solution, which we recommend for large workloads. 2. Alternatively, you can rent a "graduated license", which includes a limited capacity license and a maintenance contract (new versions, bug fixes, technical assistance) for a yearly charge. You can purchase capacity upgrades at any time, as your needs change. This is the best solution for smaller workloads - you pay according to the number of lists you are using, and there is no initial investment. 3. If you are operating on a small budget, you can purchase a perpetual, limited capacity license without maintenance (these licenses come with only three months of warranty). Later, as new versions are released, you will have the options to purchase upgrade kits, and naturally you will also be able to purchase capacity upgrades, even if you elect not to purchase the new versions. In most cases, the optimal licensing policy is a simple function of the number of lists that you are running. On the other hand, some organizations find it much easier to obtain one-time money than regular funds for maintenance. In such cases, it may be more appropriate to select the first option even if the workload does not warrant it. We can also bundle up to 3 years of maintenance with options 1 or 3. Contact SALES@LSOFT.COM for more information. Plan number 2: long-term future for VM -------------------------------------- If VM is staying, the simplest solution is to keep all the lists, files and other LISTSERV resources on VM, where your users expect them to be, while offloading the resource intensive SMTP deliveries to an inexpensive system (which you can view as a kind of "SMTP controller" for your mainframe). Even on the very largest VM LISTSERV sites, LISTSERV only consumes a few percent of one CPU. It is the SMTP servers that account for the bulk of the mailing list cycles, and that do so much I/O that each server essentially renders one volume unusable for other purposes. There may be reasons to migrate LISTSERV to another machine of course, but resource consumption is simply not one of them. By keeping LISTSERV on VM, you simplify the migration considerably - for your technical staff, for your users, and even for your operators: - Because the lists and other LISTSERV resources remain on VM, the change is totally transparent to the users. Only the most technical users will notice the extra "Received:" line in mail headers. Others will just think the mainframe was upgraded, tuned, or just had spinachs for breakfast. - Naturally, leaving the lists on VM also means significantly reduced manpower costs for the migration. A simple, one-line configuration change directs the deliveries to the "SMTP controller". You do not need to rebuild the lists, recreate file catalogs and list archive structures, etc. - The mainframe, with its high reliability, 24h operations and centralized, dependable backup procedures is the perfect place to keep your mission critical data. Many PC and workstation systems, on the other hand, use a file system where the integrity of your data is not guaranteed; files may be lost or corrupted following a power outage or system failure. In fact, this is the second largest source of incident reports for the workstation versions of LISTSERV. There is no need for you to go through any of that when you can simply keep the data on VM where it is safe. - The "SMTP controller", with its more limited RAS and backup procedures, will not contain any permanent mission critical data. Because the only customer data on the machine is the in-transit mail queue, you will probably not need to back up the machine regularly (the SMTP mail queue is similar to a RSCS/BITNET spool queue for a high speed link - the files are processed so quickly that not even daily backups are of much use). In a way, the SMTP controller is similar to an 8232/3172: you back it up every time you install a new software revision, or then you back up the media containing the software upgrade kit so that you can reapply it on top of the original distributions if the worst should happen. - You can use the VM system as a backup while you repair/reinstall the SMTP controller, whereas if LISTSERV were on the SMTP controller, you would have no service when it goes down. SMTP controllers are so cheap that you can even buy two for redundancy. While L-Soft could sell you a turnkey SMTP controller, it is usually much more cost effective for academic sites to build one themselves, taking advantage of the generous academic discounts from most computer manufacturers and available on-site expertise with non-mainframe systems. Here is how you can implement your migration at the lowest possible cost. You will need to purchase: * The SMTP controller hardware and operating system (see below for some possible hardware selections). * A "DISTRIBUTE-only" LISTSERV license for the SMTP controller (typically US$550/year including maintenance, but please contact SALES@LSOFT.COM for a binding quote). * A maintenance contract for your VM LISTSERV and/or LMail. * A LISTSERV-TCP/IP license upgrade for your VM system, if you also want to migrate from BITNET to TCP/IP. If LISTSERV is the only reason you subscribe to BITNET, this is usually more cost effective than continuing your BITNET membership. Switching to TCP/IP also insulates you from the problems associated with the BITNET core saturation; in a worst case scenario, the TCP/IP servers can be reconfigured to completely ignore the existence of the overloaded BITNET servers, using the Internet for routing and delivery. The BITNET servers, on the other hand, are intrinsically captive as they can only operate through the BITNET network. Technically, the "SMTP controllers" can be any PC, workstation or server-based system running any operating system with a SMTP implementation that can handle your workload. In practice, the goal is to save money, so you will want a PC or workstation based system. Since this machine will have no interactive users and (as we have seen) no mission critical data, the only aspects that really matter are price, capacity/upgradability, and the general level of reliability of the hardware and operating system. Using PC technology, a SMTP controller with a sustained capacity of 360,000 daily deliveries (suitable for workloads with a weekday average of 250,000 or less) can be had for as little as US$6,000 (US price from a major, "serious" manufacturer with 3 years of warranty). In practice, you will probably want to spend a bit more for a more robust design with redundant fans and power supplies, ECC memory, additional SIMM slots for upgradability, thermal monitoring, UPS, weekend and evening service coverage, etc. A top of the line, high availability PC-based solution can still be had for under US$10,000 - or you could just buy two of the $6,000 systems for redundancy. Of course, with academic discounts it may be more cost effective to use a workstation system. We are only mentioning the PC based systems because we have found that most VM customers assume that a server or at least a high-end workstation system is required for workloads in excess of 150,000 per day. In fact a simple PC can handle much more than that. You can migrate your workload off VM even if your total budget is only US$10,000 (US estimate; hardware prices may vary in other countries). ************************************************************************* ***************** New LISTSERV High Performance product ***************** ************************************************************************* While LISTSERV has always had the reputation of being the fastest available list manager, the democratization of the Internet is creating new needs and placing new demands on Internet solutions - at a rate which far exceeds the (already impressive) increases in computing power. Two years ago, a "very large" mailing list was 15,000 subscribers, "a lot" of lists meant a couple hundred, and "a whole bunch" of subscribers would be a total of 50,000. Having been designed for scalability, LISTSERV was able to handle these workloads very well. Today, a very large list would be 75,000-100,000 subscribers, a lot of lists would mean 500-1000, and a whole bunch of subscribers would be 100,000-200,000. LISTSERV can still handle these workloads without problem. Tomorrow's customers, however, are looking at much larger workloads. About 6 months ago, a large corporate customer asked us if LISTSERV could handle 50,000 daily subscriptions to a list of 100,000 or more subscribers. They were planning to start electronic newsletters for some new products, and wanted to advertise this Internet presence in the press. Their marketing department estimated that there might be up to 50,000 subscriptions a day, and they wanted to know what kind of hardware they would need for this. Naturally they wanted a scalable solution, so it had to be possible to double the capacity for at most 3 times the original cost. Well, LISTSERV could not do it. We looked at the fastest non-mainframe systems available at the time, and found that LISTSERV would barely meet the 50,000 requirement. Being the top of the line, these systems would not be upgradable. With peered lists and a second system, we might have been able to make it, but this was not the customer's idea of a simple, robust, easy to maintain solution. Unless you were willing to buy a Cray, this problem could not be solved by buying faster hardware. Many other corporate customers expressed a similar interest. Some were expecting 500,000 to 1,000,000 subscribers in one year. Others had more modest needs, but the postings were time critical and had to reach all 250,000 subscribers in an hour, barring a network outage. These were all problems for which no solution existed, but for which there was a clear business need. So, we decided to work on these problems, and the High Performance version of LISTSERV (which we dubbed "LISTSERV-HPO") is one of the solutions we have developed to meet these needs. Combined with LSMTP, LISTSERV-HPO should be able to meet the needs of tomorrow's customers. But LISTSERV-HPO is not useful only to customers with millions of subscribers and tens of thousands of daily subscriptions. If you have a large but more modest workload, LISTSERV-HPO can help you decrease your hardware costs. To give you an idea of what LISTSERV-HPO can do on modest hardware, here are some figures from benchmarks made on one of our LAN servers - a 90MHz Pentium(R) with 32M of (non EDO) memory, running Windows NT(TM). This is the kind of system that most people buy for their LAN services nowadays. After creating a list with 100,000 subscribers, we added 100 new subscribers (with the QUIET option, to measure the performance of LISTSERV and not that of the mail system). The elapsed time, for all 100 users, was 2.2 seconds. That is, the average ADD time per user was 0.022 second elapsed. Naturally, in a real world case you would not use the QUIET option, and it would take a few seconds to a few minutes for the users to receive the welcome message. But these are fixed resource costs which do not depend on the size of the list. The time spent actually adding the user to the list is 0.022 second - with 100,000 existing subscribers. The mail delivery tasks scale up very well to multiprocessor systems, and are the kind of problem that can be solved easily by purchasing more hardware. Of course, you probably do not run lists with 100,000 subscribers, nor do you need the ability to deliver millions of messages a day. You probably have a few lists in the 5,000-20,000 range, generating around 250,000 daily deliveries (M-F) which historically have been doubling every year. Your purchase must last at least a year, because this is your budgeting cycle, so you need a machine capable of handling at least 500,000 daily deliveries, and preferably 750,000 to avoid bad surprises. You were planning on migrating this workload to a high-end workstation with two processors, 192M of memory and 6 SCSI disks on two SCSI buses for good swapping response time, with a list price on the order of $50,000. You know that this configuration can do 250,000 daily deliveries easily, because others have done it, and you can reasonably hope that it will scale up to 500,000. Beyond that, there is no hard data, because no one is running mailing list workloads generating more than around 450,000 deliveries on busy days (except on VM). In fact, there are a number of known scalability problems with sendmail, and another known problem is that, on a system with hundreds of sendmail processes and heavy swapping rates, it may be difficult to make the LISTSERV process run smoothly and not accumulate a backlog. With LISTSERV-HPO and LSMTP, you could run your 500,000 daily workload on a workstation costing around $20,000 list. For another $5,000, you could add the necessary memory to allow LSMTP to use the system to its fullest and reach an estimated 1-1.5 million daily deliveries (see the separate announcement for more details on LSMTP's performance and planned availability). You save $25-30,000, get more capacity, and the assurance that you will not run into unexpected scalability problems as your load increases. The reason this solution is so much cheaper is that LSMTP does not create a new process for each connection, and thus requires a lot less memory. This also means your machine does not swap, and you only need to provide I/O bandwidth for the mail queue. You can handle 500,000 deliveries with just 64M (assuming the workstation is not used interactively, or at least not with X-Windows), with the standard system disk that comes with the machine and an additional high-performance disk for the mail queue. To double your capacity, you simply double the amount of memory from 64M to 128M. ************************************************************************* ******** Free LISTSERV-HPO upgrade for early VM TCP/IP customers ******** ************************************************************************* Customers who purchased our LTCP-9000 package last year (or its corporate equivalent) will receive a free upgrade to the High Performance version of LISTSERV-TCP/IP for their VM system. This upgrade includes a new perpetual license for LISTSERV-HPO and a free maintenance upgrade for the current maintenance term. At the end of the current maintenance term, customers will have the option to renew their maintenance for the LISTSERV-HPO product, or to revert to the regular LISTSERV product to save on maintenance charges. For VM customers with large workloads, the difference in maintenance charges is expected to be less than the cost of the CPU cycles saved thanks to the enhanced algorithms of the High Performance version. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- LMAIL, L-SOFT, LISTSERV and LSMTP are trademarks of L-Soft international. Unix is a registered trademark of UNIX Systems Laboratories, Inc. OpenVMS and VMS are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation. Windows and Windows NT are trademarks of Microsoft corporation. Pentium is a trademark of Intel Corporation. All other trademarks, both marked and not marked, are the property of their respective owners. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================================================== 66 Return-Path: <@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU,@SEARN.SUNET.SE:Postmaster@LSOFT.COM> Received: from UBVM (NJE origin SMTP@UBVM) by UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 6806; Wed, 24 May 1995 10:22:20 -0400 Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE by UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R3) with TCP; Wed, 24 May 95 10:22:11 EDT Received: from LSOFT.COM by SEARN.SUNET.SE (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 8411; Wed, 24 May 95 16:18:18 +0200 Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE (NJE origin MAILER@LSOFT) by LSOFT.COM (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 4241; Wed, 24 May 1995 16:18:16 +0200 Received: from SEARN (NJE origin SMTPF@SEARN) by SEARN.SUNET.SE (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 4822; Wed, 24 May 1995 16:18:14 +0200 Received: from SEGATE.SUNET.SE by SEARN.SUNET.SE (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with TCP; Wed, 24 May 95 16:18:11 +0200 Received: from segate.sunet.se by SEGATE.SUNET.SE (LSMTP for OpenVMS v0.1a) with SMTP id F3539EF3 ; Wed, 24 May 1995 16:21:55 +0200 Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE by SEARN.SUNET.SE (LISTSERV release 1.8b) with NJE id 3117 for LSTSRV-M@SEARN.SUNET.SE; Wed, 24 May 1995 16:17:38 +0200 Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE (NJE origin ERIC@SEARN) by SEARN.SUNET.SE (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with RFC822 id 4801; Wed, 24 May 1995 16:17:37 +0200 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 16:00:50 +0200 Reply-To: Eric Thomas Sender: L-Soft LISTSERV administrators From: Eric Thomas Subject: Instruction for installing version 1.8b To: Multiple recipients of list LSTSRV-M Version 1.8b is being released. Depending on your operating system, the procedure to fetch and install the new version will be as follows: - VM: No change from the previous versions. The update will be sent to your server in the usual INSTALL format. Due to its size and to the current BITNET congestion, it may take a while for the update to arrive. Please contact SALES@LSOFT.COM if you have not received your update by Monday. - VMS: FTP to FTP.LSOFT.COM, CD LISTSERV/VMS, and get the ZIP file corresponding to your architecture. The KITINSTAL procedure will automatically determine that this is an upgrade rather than a fresh installation and proceed accordingly. - unix: FTP to FTP.LSOFT.COM, CD LISTSERV/unix, and get both common.tar.Z and `uname`.tar.Z, then use the 'make update' stage to update your system. - Windows NT: FTP to FTP.LSOFT.COM, CD LISTSERV/WINDOWS and get INTEL.ZIP, then follow the instructions in the installation guide (unchanged from the beta updates). IMPORTANT: VMS and unix users, and all users of LISTSERV-TCP/IP for VM should have received a private license key for version 1.8b separately. This license key should be installed BEFORE applying the update. Under VMS and unix, you can check that you have the right license key by issuing a SHOW LICENSE command to LISTSERV and checking the version number. If it reads 1.8a, you do not have the correct key. For Windows NT, 1.8b is the first supported version and thus all license keys were already issued for 1.8b. For LISTSERV-TCP/IP under VM, license keys are new with 1.8b - please see the special instructions in the maintainer's notes. Under VM, the code will operate without a license key until 1 Jul 1995. LISTSERV-NJE does not use license keys. If you have any problem with the delivery of your license key or software update, please write to SALES@LSOFT.COM. Eric