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From: david@actsn.fay.ar.us (David Summers)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: How efficient/fast is uucp?
Summary: Replacing the protocol is easy (if you have the source).
Keywords: uucp zmodem
Message-ID: <536@actsn.fay.ar.us>
Date: 24 Aug 90 06:41:03 GMT
References: <8464@pitt.UUCP>
Organization: All Church Technical Service, Fayetteville, AR
Lines: 25

In article <8464@pitt.UUCP>, jonathan@cs.pitt.edu (Jonathan Eunice) writes:
> [ ... deleted ... ] 
> In a related matter, how difficult would it be to replace uucp's
> protocol(s) with zmodem or a similar fast protocol?  Or with a slower
> one (!), or a compressed one, or whatever?  Ie, is uucp bound to its
> current protocol(s)?

Replacing the protocol with your own is *fairly* easy.  When we used to have
a source license for Unix I played with adding my own (bi-directional) file
transfer to UUCP.  The source code for HDB is very well layed out and I was
even able to fool UUCP into doing bi-directional file transfers (using my own
protocol).  It had to start up a total of 8 processes per machine to handle
things correctly (and elegantly) but it seemed to work.  Now if I could only
get the error recovery to work 100% of the time!  (sigh).

If anyone is interested in discussing error recovery on a simple
(bi-directional) file transfer protocol then I would very much like to talk
things over with you.

   - David Summers
   - (david@actsn.fay.ar.us)
-- 
I'm sick and tired of this machine, I wish that I could sell it.
It never does just what I want, but only what I tell it!
- David Summers (david@actsn.fay.ar.us)