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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!tektronix!ucbcad!ucbvax!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.bugs.uucp
Subject: Re: uucp must use full system names
Message-ID: <307@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 9-Sep-83 11:59:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.307
Posted: Fri Sep  9 11:59:06 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Sep-83 13:34:16 EDT
References: <838@gummo.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Labs, Columbus
Lines: 61


	gummo!ber    Sep  8 09:12:00 1983

	The correct behaviour of uucp is that which is reasonable, effective
	and logically valid.  Although most versions of uucp truncate
	system names to seven characters, that behaviour is incorrect.

I don't know where ber gets his ideas about what "correct" means, but
I beg to differ.  When you have a large network of over 1500 sites,
many of which you have no idea who they are or how to contact them,
and you do not have administrative control over any of them, the
ONLY correct behavior is behavior which is upward compatible with
the existing protocol, or which has a behavior which is not quite
compatible but nothing really bad happens.  Don't forget, too, that
there are people with binary licenses out there.

While I think it is silly for UUCP to truncate at 7 characters, I
believe that decision was made to force spooled files of the form
C.abcdefgP1234 to fit in the 14 character filename space.  I am not
convinced that a few sites suddenly not truncating will not break
some site somewhere severely (e.g. cause uucico to dump core from
some buffer which has overflowed.)

I call on the authors of this new UUCP to do the following:

(1) Describe this new behavior in more detail.  Exactly what is different?
System names get transferred in lots of different places - in the
Shere=sysname, in the reply, in file names stored, in filenames
transferred, in filename copy requests, in the files that are
transferred that are generated by UUCP, in mail, in news.  Which
of these are affected?  Is there a new upper limit on the length
of a host name, or the number of characters that must be unique,
such as 14?

(2) Convince the net that the behavior of this new UUCP is upward
compatible with the existing versions of UUCP.

(3) If there is a simple set of changes that can be made to an
existing UUCP that will upgrade it, post this set of changes and tell
us how to upgrade, what the results of this upgrade will be, and
what will happen if they don't upgrade.

(4) Tell us what machines currently run this new UUCP, and what
distributions will contain it.  I would also tell you that it is
crucial for this UUCP to go into the public domain, but since you
are an employee of Bell Labs, we all know where that would lead.

I also submit that we (those of us running UUCP) as a network are
vulnerable, because there is no "standard" document that defines
the UUCP protocol.  Lacking such a document, we cannot point to
it as defense against some new incompatible implementation.  This
problem has come up before - some system changes their UUCP to
check certain things that were not checked before for security
reasons, and some other system changes things so that these checks
no longer work.  Both new UUCP's work with a vanilla V7 UUCP, but
they don't work with each other.  Who is wrong?  Nobody knows.
I call on the experts on the net (Lauren Weinstein, Peter Honeyman,
and whoever else is involved and interested) to write a standard
document that defines the UUCP protocol.

	Mark Horton