Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!midway!gargoyle!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Another Novice Needs sendmail Help
Message-ID: <1990Dec17.202553.10537@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 17 Dec 90 20:25:53 GMT
References: <1990Dec12.021841.4983@Latour.Sandelman.OCUnix.On.Ca> <1990Dec13.203054.17265@chinet.chi.il.us> <1990Dec15.235725.19155@Latour.Sandelman.OCUnix.On.Ca>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 47

In article <1990Dec15.235725.19155@Latour.Sandelman.OCUnix.On.Ca> mcr@Latour.Sandelman.OCUnix.On.Ca (Michael Richardson) writes:

>>  les@chinet.chi.il.us

>  I'm not sure what you had to go through to register chinet.chi.il.us:
>(I'm sure glad they didn't mandate chinet.chicago.il.us!) --- but
>wouldn't it be easier if there was the one MX record pointing 
>*.chi.il.us to some friendly local site? (It need not be the actual
>machine with the MX record)

I don't administer chinet and wasn't involved with getting the domain
registered.  Chicago is something of an unusual case, though, because
there is hardly any such thing as a local call here - almost every call
has a "call-unit" charge associated depending on the time and distance.
A group of people interested in news and mail got together and laid
out paths to minimize the charges, but that wasn't really related to
the domain name at all.

>  [I'm assuming that chinet's link to the rest of the world is some
>sort of dialup link, e.g. UUCP -- you aren't actually on the Internet]
>  If authority was given to the chi.il.us forwarder to create 
>sub-domains and they made it as easy to register site.chi.il.us as
>it is to register a UUCP Zone site, the UUCP maps would go away. 

Actually, I understand .us wanting to register sites individually,
but I would think the forwarder would want to maintain its own
namespace for any  connections that would otherwise not have a
domain name.  This could also be done by a uucp machine that
has a domain name of its own, though.  For example, I set up the
domain fb.com through uunet to cover a fairly dispersed group
of uucp machines.  There is one set of machines that all use the
same alias file, so the From: line is just user@fb.com on any
mail leaving any of these machines, but the mail transport will
also automatically resolve user@anything.fb.com by stripping off
the .fb.com and looking at what is left, so mail will actually go
to any uucp neighbor without doing anything else to set up
the name.

>  I'm beginning to find that with the Internet two telebit hops
> away that there is very little point in keeping extensive maps.

And when uunet is your forwarder, there is no reason to keep
any maps at all except your local links and the things you need
to get around any non-reversable paths.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us