[FADCA] FACTS About WL2K

[Jerald A DeLong]

After taking some time today to carefully review the WL2K presentation
from the 2010 Orlando HamCation I note the following observation:

http://fadca.org/ecomm/wl2k_presentation_from_hamcation%202010.pps


E-Mail via HAM Radio - How do Hams do that.

According to this presentation "In oder to do email, it is necessary to
link to a WL2K RADIO MAIL Server (RMS) Station.

The fact of the matter is, this is not necessarily true at all and can
be accomplished in many way. HAMs have been doing this for many years
now without W2LK support.

In the mid 1980 this was done using KA9Q Nos or now know as Jnos/Tnos,
MFnos using Dos and Linux operating systems and still being done daily
on the AMPR Net. In later years it became much easier to do this using
native support found in Linux operating systems.

One such method of which would be well suited for the Florida layered
networks.

Currently most of the HAM RADIO Packet nodes in Florida are setup using
FPAC running on Linux operating system. Linux has native support for
sending and receiving email and/or SMTP and POP protocols. So with that
being said what are the true advantages of using our current FPAC node
to send and receive e-mail vs WL2K.

The first thing that comes to mind would be a true fault tolerant email
network. Each Internet connected node would **not** have to relay it's
email to a Central Mail Server (CMS) as WL2K calls it. Every node that
is Internet connected could send mail on it own cutting out the middle
man. This would be less prone to failure. If a node was unable to be
Internet connect or the Internet connection failed the mail could then
be proxies by one of the many nodes within it's own network. So every
node in the network is now a Central Mail Server.

A very simple concept to understand it how Internet email works that you
use every day.


** With WL2K, the Central Mail Servers (CMS) are a single point of
failure.**

Also lets not forget about the HF bandwidth that can be saved by
eliminating WL2K Pactor forwarding station that would not be needed by a
real MESHED fault tolerant email network.

WL2K could maybe used as a backup but surly not as a primary way of
transporting HAM Radio Email and building a true fault tolerant email
network. If this were the case you would see hundreds of company's
trying to do this commercially as redundancy to their corporate networks
and Internet email.     

Why reinvent the wheel? The entire Internet is currently setup this way
so why do we need special programs like WL2K to send HAM Radio email?

It is of my opinion that FADCA and many other HAM communities are easy
led a stray because there are not enough IT Professional LIKE MYSELF who
of which are building large scale network daily taking a stand and
setting the record straight.

For over 3 years now may FPAC node has been email enable via the
Internet, AMPR Net, and the Florida ROSE network being able to send and
receive email any where in the world without WL2K support.

http://fpac.kd4yal.ampr.org/squirrelmail/src/login.php




Jerry DeLong, MCSE 
KD4YAL