Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route) Message-ID: Date: 14 Jul 89 01:50:59 GMT References: <1062@aber-cs.UUCP> <59767@uunet.UU.NET> <3648@ncar.ucar.edu> <3842@phri.UUCP> <1989Jul13.153336.3175@eci386.uucp> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: OSU Lines: 36 In-reply-to: clewis@eci386.uucp's message of 13 Jul 89 15:33:36 GMT clewis@eci386.uucp writes: > Ignoring Internet, I think the relevant quote here is approximately: "The Internet is not the entire universe, but it is its center." --attributed to Greg Woods, I believe. In other words, "ignoring Internet" is not a very good thing to do. > It also appears obvious that anyone giving an explicit bang path > (eg: a!b!c!d) may very well know what they're doing, and it shouldn't be > touched. Not so. A random sampling of 263 !-paths which passed through my system earlier this month (I picked a few wholly arbitrary "grep" criteria on /usr/spool/uucp/mail.log) revealed that the average !-path length is more than twice as long as the average length of a path in /usr/lib/uucp/paths. The users do not know what they are doing. They're guessing, and badly so. > Can you just imagine if two rabid-rerouters thought that the best way to > site "foo" was thru each other? The fact that you address the matter as "if" implies that you have never seen this occur. Is this so? I have never seen it occur, either. Therefore, in practice, this is no threat. I have more trouble with 2 mailers in a single organization which think that delivery should occur on the "other system." This is not to say that I agree entirely with GRR (General Rabid Rerouting). I prefer only DARR (Domain Absolutist RR), that is, rightmost domain strip, and only that. But I can see why others do it. -- I think that everyone's brains get scrambled one way or another. --Killashandra Ree