Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!nosc!crash!bblue
From: bblue@crash.cts.com (Bill Blue)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: HoneyDanBer uucp question
Keywords: uucp SystemV
Message-ID: <842@crash.cts.com>
Date: 6 Dec 89 06:41:27 GMT
References: <572@starfire.UUCP> <1195@becker.UUCP> <601@engadm.UUCP>
Reply-To: bblue@crash.cts.com (Bill Blue)
Organization: Crash TimeSharing, El Cajon, CA
Lines: 40

In article <601@engadm.UUCP> brian@motcsd.UUCP (Brian Smithson) writes:
>bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker) writes:
>>	Some uucp implementations send only the first
>>	6 or 7 characters of the system name.  If this
>>	is true of your system, you need to have that
>>	name in the MACHINE and VALIDATE fields.
>>	LOGNAME is restricted to 8 characters since
>>	that's all most password files will handle.
>>	You will probably have interesting problems with
>>	"smail" on the HDB sites as well (if they use it),
>>	if this turns out to be the problem...
>
>I have that problem here.  I'm running System V and HDB with smail.  Here's
>what I do:
>
>(1) Identify the system by the first 7 characters, e.g. "starfir" instead
>	of "starfire", in the Systems and Permissions files.  The login name
>	(and LOGNAME entry in Permissions) can be as long as you want, but the
>	trailing characters are probably ignored.
>
>(2) Put "starfire = starfir" in a glue file that gets fed to pathalias
>	so that smail will recognize "starfire" as a valid name.  This permits
>	e-mail replies to work.
>
>It seems to work OK for e-mail and file transfers.  Bear in mind that what I
>do here is what you will want to have your HDB neighbors do.  You shouldn't
>have to do anything special on your system.

This technique also is working well here on Xenix 2.3.x HDB.  What's
odd though, is that I don't have to do it with *every* eight character
site name that I (crash) talk to, only certain ones.  There was one
sitename (I don't recall which one right now) whose 8 character name
would fail if it was named specifically in Permissions (MACHINE), but
worked ok if not named directly by using the OTHER operator (something
that is apparently unique to Xenix).  Yet another 8 character name
would fail regardless, until I aliased the 7 character version of it
as described above.  It must be a certain combination of letters, or
the exact 7th or 8th character that is setting it off.

--Bill