Hi. As many of you know already, Merit has turned over operations for the NSFNET service to Advanced Network and Services (ANS). ANS personnel now staff and manage the NOC and provide real-time engineering support for the backbone, while Merit retains its Internet Engineering, Network Management Systems, and Information Services groups. Merit will continue to support the NSFNET Policy Routing Database and related configuration services as well as routing coordination for the NSF regionals and midlevels. Because of this, e-mail for NOC staff is being moved to a machine in the "ans.net" domain. The TROUBLE@merit.edu mailbox will now be TROUBLE@ans.net. The merit.edu entry for TROUBLE will soon be a pointer to the ans.net list. Please begin using the ans.net address to report problems and other NSFNET NOC related issues to the ANS staff. We at Merit will remain accessible and respond quickly to your questions, problems, escalation or administrative issues related to the NSFNET backbone services. We have set up a new list called NSFNET@merit.edu for this purpose, and several Merit managers and senior staff will be reading this list. Feel free to use this list to communicate with us. The other existing lists to reach Merit staff will also remain operational, for example: ie@merit.edu The Internet Engineering group, for technical communication related to routing issues. nsfnet-admin@merit.edu The Policy Routing Database administration and configuration operations group, for network announcement change requests and other changes. nsfnet-info@merit.edu For general user-related information about the NSFNET or the Internet. Also please feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about any of this. Mark