Out of office/vacation messages

Stephen J. Wilcox steve at telecomplete.co.uk
Sat Jan 3 15:06:42 UTC 2004


> On Jan 2, 2004, at 10:31 AM, Joe Abley wrote:
> > On 2 Jan 2004, at 10:44, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
> >
> >>>  - run on Windows, 
> >>> Oops, I see your problem.  No self-respecting network operator runs any
> >>> M$W boxen as an MTA, so Templin is an imposter/troll.
> >>
> >> This isnt true, the majority run Windows (at least thats what I see in
> >> various meetings and from the user-agent headers)
> >
> > I'm not arguing with your conclusion, but your reasoning is a little 
> > broken. Only a small proportion of the nanog list membership attend 
> > meetings, and those that do don't necessarily provide a representative 
> > distribution (of any kind).
> >
> > Similarly, the user-agent headers you see are from people on nanog-post; I
> > am told the nanog list is much bigger.

Ok true, perhaps I can get a job in journalism doing statistics ;) But anyway, 
I'm still pretty sure even with my flawed reasoning that most people are using 
Windows and those that arent are you or I who dont hold a typical netops 
position as there is still this insistence in most companies that all employees 
use standard hardware, OS and software.

> it does bear noting that there's a difference between an MUA (UA == 
> user agent) and an MTA (TA == transfer agent).  rereading the 
> discussion w/that in mind might put a different spin on it for you. ;-)

Heh, yeah I missed that! Ok well again using my broken reasoning I still reckon
based on observation that most regular companies use MS for their MTA and that
the ones using *nix are mainly ISPs. Applying this to network operators and its 
a bit hazy but again based on experience very often internal mail falls under IT 
and IT consists of a bunch of MSCEs running Exchange.... I can check this using 
the Received headers posted to nanog  and a quick grep shows a rather large 
number of Microsoft boxes..

Steve (going off on a tangent)




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