Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uupsi!vmp!oc From: oc@vmp.com (Orlan Cannon) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: Another Novice Needs sendmail Help Message-ID: <1990Dec8.234514.11668@vmp.com> Date: 8 Dec 90 23:45:14 GMT References: <59@sgtech.UUCP> <1990Dec07.200835.20108@chinet.chi.il.us> Organization: Video Marketing & Publications, Inc., Oradell, NJ Lines: 55 In article <1990Dec07.200835.20108@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: >In article karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu writes: > >>Somewhat more mundanely...t'ain't no such domain as "sgtech.uucp" in a >>Real Sense. The top-level domain ".uucp" is a hack instigated vaguely >>of necessity by the UUCP Project when getting registrations going and >>when creating smail 2.x. Having hosts within that domain is a bit >>bizarre at best. > >Has anyone considered an internet nameserver for .uucp? Or is this >one of those silly questions where everyone else already knows >why something so obvious isn't being done? > >The .uucp appendage doesn't mean anything to real uucp sites - it >had to be intended as syntactic sugar to coax internet sites into >believing that they really exist. If Rutgers or Uunet (or anyone >else, for that matter) would provide name service for everything >in the uucp maps the illusion would be complete and everyone >else could stop treating .uucp as a special case. > >Is this physically or politically impossible, or is no one willing >to do it? Gee, Les, I seem to remember the first documents I got about the UUCP Project. I vaguely recall that the idea was to register all the UUCP sites just like the Internet sites and set up a not-for-profit nameserver just to handle the correct routing of this kind of mail. Thus was UUNET born. (Can anyone fill me in on this part of UUNET history?) Of course, now UUNET is a for-profit corporation, and its goals and responsibilities are less defined. The main thing I hear from them on the net these days is apologies for mail getting severely backed up at Internet sites because they can only handle something like 200 concurrent sendmail processes (or something like that). I think the original concept is absurd because noone really knows the true extent of the UUCP world. Especially now that there are so many implementations of UUCP in the non-Unix world that are connecting to the UUCP mail network. As a for-profit company, UUNET has to try to get maximum usage from their hardware, which means delays, slower throughput, but increased real "throughput", regardless of what their critics say. (Can you imagine what these mail-deliviery problems would be like *without* UUNET?) My personal feeling? UUNET is a great start, but they're close to overloaded. We need to start the UUCP Project all over again. Perhaps a not-for-profit UUNET2? -- Orlan Cannon oc@vmp.com Video Marketing & Publications, Inc. (800) 627-4551 Oradell, NJ 07649