Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp From: tp@mccall.com Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Who pays the bill? Message-ID: <3282.26b5943f@mccall.com> Date: 31 Jul 90 14:22:54 GMT References: <26A738A8.725B@tct.uucp> <26B059CA.57CF@tct.uucp> <3270.26b4665b@mccall.com> <3275.26b54aab@mccall.com> Lines: 85 Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA Lines: 82 In article , emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes: > In article <3275.26b54aab@mccall.com> tp@mccall.com writes: > > Once upon a time, my email address was > . ... > > If you use a domain name that doesn't belong to you, you deserve to > lose. That simple enough? cf *.austin.ibm.com. It did belong to me. It was assigned to me by the administrator of the higher level domain (claremont.edu), over which I had absolutely no control. I wasn't even aware that it was unregistered until I was informed that mail to me bounced. In article , lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot) writes: > There are an absurdly large number of sites that use the news reply > path, and for me to bang on each one of them would be a waste of my > time. Much easier is it to just reroute their mail. OK, I can see your justification for rerouting. I'd been away from the net for a while, and thought that problem had pretty much cleared up. I think I like the suggestion someone else posted: if you send news over a link that you don't want carrying mail, throw a monkey-wrench into the path line so that it will bounce. It is your right to control how the link is used, and it might get people to upgrade their software so as to not use the Path: line improperly. > Actually, I lied. In that particular case, I would have routed to > uunet.uu.net, because I do neighbor checking, and uunet doesn't > register a neighbor named maverick.ksu.ksu.edu. So even if there are > ghost sites in the maps, it would take a particularly weird UUCP setup > to throw me off (even with your unregistered domain). I'm glad to hear it. I don't think most rerouters go to that much trouble (and all my complaints still apply to the rest of them). I assume that by neighbor checking, you mean that you check each hop of the path to see if the maps list a connection between those sites. I further assume that if you find a hop that isn't listed in the maps, you route to the site before it (i.e to the last site to which the path was verified). If my assumptions are correct, I can't think of a case you can't handle properly. MOST sites that I have been aware of from time to time that did aggressive rerouting used the algorithm supplied by smail, which is to route to the rightmost host in the bang path that can be found in the maps. This is extremely bad, and subject to all the gripes I've mentioned. To all rerouters: Please, if you MUST reroute, do it the way Eliot does (or the way I assume he does it), or route only to the first hop on the path. DO NOT do it the way smail does it. I think it is smail -R that does this (haven't been on unix for a few years, so I'm not sure), and the docs recommend you don't use it! > To have a domain and not register it would be silly. It happens all > the time, but it never lasts long; it's simply too easy to Do The > Right Thing(tm) and get it registered. Still, why bounce it if you don't have to? Again, neighbor checking seems to handle it, but most rerouters don't. > There are several issues that rabid rerouters have to take into > account, and one of them is that ghost sites exist. Another is that > the pathalias databases must be consistant accross the network. A > potential for failure could be rutgers using new maps but not > distributing them. Another would be rutgers distributing them, and a > rabid rerouter not not using them. This has not happened, to the best > of my knowledge. I have no specific knowlege as to how rutgers reroutes mail. I simply know that I frequently route around them. I tend to doubt that the problem comes from maps being out of sync, but I don't know that either. At a previous site, several years ago, I was eventually forced to declare them dead to pathalias. This was back when VERY few sites were registered, and the potential for error was much greater. -- Terry Poot The McCall Pattern Company (uucp: ...!rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp) 615 McCall Road (800)255-2762, in KS (913)776-4041 Manhattan, KS 66502, USA