Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!mintaka!yale!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!ucsd!nosc!logicon.com!Makey From: Makey@Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted Message-ID: <720@logicon.com> Date: 20 Jul 90 23:16:05 GMT References: <1990Jul16.202721.271@chinet.chi.il.us> <26A4DCA7.16B1@intercon.com> <26A76773.3660@intercon.com> Organization: Logicon, Inc., San Diego, California Lines: 46 In article <26A76773.3660@intercon.com> amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) writes: >when my sendmail decides a message is headed offsite, it queues up a UUX >command to the appropriate host that says "rmail user@host.domain". I don't >have to run pathalias; our newsfeed doesn't even include comp.mail.maps... How do you know which is the appropriate host? Letting uunet handle mail to unrecognized domains and unregistered hosts is nothing more than a cop-out, as uunet must maintain the routing information that you don't. >I do not see why anyone but the site directly involved should have to care >about how machines are actually connected, only what particular machine a >piece of mail is going to. The DNS serves admirably well at providing this >information. Only when the DNS is available and only for registered sites. Some facts of real life are that the Internet and its DNS is not always available, and there will always be unregistered sites that someone will want to send mail to. As a site that is directly on the Internet, and also speaks UUCP, I consider it an important feature of UUCP that it is completely independent of the Internet. My 56Kb Internet connection is great, when it works, but it is occasionally unavailable for some reason or another (e.g., hardware problems, usage policy). When this happens, UUCP will still get the mail through. I realize that a *lot* of UUCP traffic actually travels over the Internet. It doesn't have to. I can change all of my UUCP-over-TCP links to UUCP-over-telephone in about 5 minutes when necessary. >Running pathalias and keeping your own complete UUCP map for doing source >routing is like using old-style host tables on the Internet... Local >connectivity information should stay local. Pathalias is just a different form of domain name resolver, and comp.mail.maps is an excellent mechanism for distributing the domain database to sites that don't, won't, or can't use the Internet DNS. One of my major gripes is that there is so little overlap between the UUCP Map and the Internet DNS that I am compelled to support both. :: Jeff Makey Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department Disclaimer: All opinions are strictly those of the author. Internet: Makey@Logicon.COM UUCP: {nosc,ucsd}!logicon.com!Makey