Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!ames!ncar!woods From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: Re^2: Short-circuiting a route Message-ID: <3650@ncar.ucar.edu> Date: 8 Jul 89 00:10:22 GMT References: <89Jun28.104844edt.10373@neat.ai.toronto.edu> <3569@ncar.ucar.edu> <4147@tank.uchicago.edu> <3572@ncar.ucar.edu> <4238@tank.uchicago.edu> Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO Lines: 27 > Matt Crawford sez: > If the Fidonet people can keep their UUCP maps up to date, then they can > keep MX records up to date at an equal level of detail. I do not believe that this is true. Consider this example: suppose a path to one of the Fido subzones (a real-life example, BTW) looks like ncar!asuvax!stjhmc!%s How does one take this and determine that "asuvax" happens to be the rightmost host in this path on the Internet, and therefore that the MX record should point to asuvax (and while we're at it, that the real name of "asuvax" is "asuvax.eas.asu.edu")? And how does one then insure, without asking the site admin of asuvax (and all the other 100 hosts that will have MX's pointing at them) that mail addressed to that Fido subzone will be properly delivered to stjhmc? Answer: you can't. Actually I shouldn't say that what Matt says "isn't true", it's just "incomplete", because he leaves out the fact that it would be orders of magnitude more work to do it this way and would require the cooperation of dozens of people instead of just one or two as the current method does. My feeling on it is that whether they "should" do it with 100 MX records or not, until someone can point out an official Internet document (RFC?) that specifically prohibits the way they are doing it now, is just a religious argument. --Greg