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: Re: UUCP path cost reduction Message-ID: Date: 9 Aug 90 22:14:10 GMT References: <11@aupair.cs.athabascau.ca> <1990Aug5.205619.9277@kth.se> <--058L5@ggpc2.ferranti.com> <42693@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com> Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA Lines: 33 heiby@mcdchg.chg.mcd.mot.com (Ron Heiby) writes: > One of the questions in the original posting asked whether it was ok > to eliminate from the pathalias output all of the paths that began > with the system acting as the "smart host". [...] > Thinking about it some, the only objection I can think of is related > to possible order dependancies in where smail 3.1 looks to try to > resolve an address. I can't point to a problem, though. Is there > one? I don't know about smail 3.1, but smail 2.5 gets wierd if you strip out the root domains: .com smarthost!%s .edu smarthost!%s etc. Stripping these makes smail 2.5 kick into rabid-rerouting in cases where it shouldn't, so mail to "host!user@somewhere.edu" can get misrouted. Leaving the root domains in the paths keeps this from happening. The reason why this happens is long and complicated, and I'll only type it in if someone's interested. Smail (both 2.5 and 3.1) might get wierd if there's a path to a subdomain that passes through smarthost, but the path to the parent domain passes through a site other than smarthost. I wish I could say that it never happens, but I just checked the paths here, and it does in a number of cases. So I'll probably change the path-fixer here to handle this, and to only remove domains on the other side of smarthost if the parent domain is also on the other side of smarthost. This is gonna be a pain. --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz