Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wang!fitz
From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: UUCP path cost reduction
Message-ID: <aqme4n.ah@wang.com>
Date: 30 Jul 90 22:21:57 GMT
Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA
Lines: 41

I'm trying to write a perl script that crunches the output of pathalias
and produces a paths file with lots of shortcuts.  Some of the things I
definitely want to cut are:

reduce:
    ...!site1!...!dom.ain!...
to:
    ...!site1!dom.ain!...
if site1 is known to be on the Internet and at least 2 hops can be removed,
or if 1 hop can be removed and dom.ain is known to be directly on the Internet.

reduce:
    ...!site1!...!site2!...
to:
    ...!site1!site2.dom.ain!...
if site2 is known to be site2.dom.ain from inspection of the paths file, and
at least 2 hops can be removed, etc.

remove:
    dom.ain    smarthost!....
lines from the paths file entirely, since this is what smail and company
will do anyway.

All shortcuts will be done so as to remove the largest number of hops from
each path, and so no mail passes through machines that it wouldn't have
passed through anyway.

Does anyone have any other suggestions about things that could be excised
from the paths, without any chance of getting things broken?

Also, both these optimizations assume a knowledge of which sites are
directly on the Internet.  Right now I'm building this list by hand, from
a map of NEARnet and some comments in the UUCP paths files.  If there's
a better source of information, I could use it.  (I don't want hosts.txt,
though).

Any other suggestions would be welcome.

---
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs        fitz@wang.com
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA   ...!uunet!wang!fitz