Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!eci386!clewis
From: clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route)
Message-ID: <1989Jul18.200848.5790@eci386.uucp>
Date: 18 Jul 89 20:08:48 GMT
References: <1062@aber-cs.UUCP> <59767@uunet.UU.NET> <3648@ncar.ucar.edu> <3842@phri.UUCP> <1989Jul13.153336.3175@eci386.uucp> <KARL.89Jul13215059@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1989Jul18.200506.5582@eci386.uucp>
Reply-To: clewis@eci386.UUCP (Chris Lewis)
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates: Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 64

In article <KARL.89Jul13215059@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes:
>clewis@eci386.uucp writes:

>In other words, "ignoring Internet" is not a very good thing to do.

True, but I was refering to UUCP-only situations.

>>  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.

That isn't necessarily the right conclusion - it *could* be that the
the maps are busted in certain ways not of interest to the net as a whole,
but of *extreme* importance to backwaters, and the backwaters have
carefully tuned *their* maps to get where they want to go.

Or, it could be that your maps are out of date.

There's probably a better chance that the route was constructed
by pathalias in the first place, by someone who's had to try to
get things thru reliable paths.

Eg: according to the published maps on our machine, our path to uunet 
has been variously:

    - thru a machine in Ottawa 300 miles the other way, that has been
      dead for months,
    - thru a machine in Waterloo, who's gateway fires it thru a machine
      in Toronto that we have a much better route to.
    - thru a machine in Arizona that advertises a bogus link to ihnp4
      (this was a *looong* time ago)
    - thru munnari....

Not ONCE in recorded history has the published maps pointed to the
machine only two hops away that has graciously offered to forward
all traffic to uunet.  So, in my path.local file, I gave up and
said:

	<gracious-machine>	uunet(0)

Rabid rerouting completely defeats this.

>>  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?

Other people have.
I have seen it occur in a different sense - at one time pathalias
thought all mail to the USA went via Belgium, Korea, Australia and 
San Francisco.
-- 
Chris Lewis, R.H. Lathwell & Associates: Elegant Communications Inc.
UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
Phone: (416)-595-5425