Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!oliveb!ames!ncar!woods From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: Re^2: Short-circuiting a route Message-ID: <3572@ncar.ucar.edu> Date: 28 Jun 89 20:27:45 GMT References: <562@daitc.daitc.mil> <89Jun28.104844edt.10373@neat.ai.toronto.edu> <3569@ncar.ucar.edu> <4147@tank.uchicago.edu> Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO Lines: 30 In article <4147@tank.uchicago.edu> matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) writes: >I think that if fidonet or anyone else wants to have mail from the >internet enter their realm at a point chosen by them, then they should >provide a person (or some automated tool) to keep up the MX records at >the required level of detail. I agree that they "should" do this, but in the net world, where people are often maintaining the software unofficially in their "spare" time, lots of people do things that just get the job done without necessarily being the "best" way to do it. That is the reality we live in. We all depend on other sites to provide service for us without any benefit to themselves; without this, the net as it is now couldn't exist. I don't know about anyone else, but my philosophy is always to ask for the lowest level of service that is absolutely necessary to get the job done. To do as Matt suggests above would require either asking for access to the orst.edu machine or having someone there willing to do frequent updates for them. If it were my machine providing that service, I wouldn't like being asked (in fact, I was already asked to install patches to the UUCP maps to get Fido nodes reachable faster than the usual map posting procedure and I refused because I didn't want to make the time commitment. And I can imagine what my bosses would say if they actually went so far as to ask for an account on the machine!) The only reason I agreed to provide routing service for them is because it was trivial to implement and requires no maintenance on my part (or didn't, until sites started doing aggressive rerouting!) All the maintenance is done by their gateway administrators who post appropriate map entries. I wonder how many domains would fall apart if we made them all maintain complete MX information like they "should" do? --Greg