Did a little study on them. The links must have been up before, otherwise
you would not be able to find ms.ess.ustc.ac.cn although you still should
be able to find ustc.ac.cn. The IP block 202.38.64.0 through 202.38.96.0 has
been registered to USTC. And the name sever is hpe25.nic.ustc.ac.cn for
the ustc.ac.cn domain delegated through ns.cnc.ac.cn.
USTC is linked through (I think) CNC to the best of my guess, which is
at China Academy of Science. Judging from the round trip time of the link,
it is either a 9.6k link, or X.25, mostly X.25 since they have it everywhere
in China through Chinapac. The speed is at most 64k. But the route is
not advertised by CNC to SprintLink (which CNC is connecting to).
They (at CNC) either have not done it, or have messed it up. But I think
it is going to be resolved (soon). Or it could be that they are purposely
denying the route so those satelite sites can not connect to Internet (for
economical or maybe political reasons).
There is possibly one way to get around it, ie through one of the CNC
computers as your email gateway (since they know the route to USTC internally).
You can try,
root%ms.ess.ustc.ac.cn@ns.cnc.ac.cn
from an Unix machine. Hope it works. Remember to ask the return mail to be
sent to,
your_user_name%your_host_name@ns.cnc.ac.cn to get pass the routing problem.
Jun