Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site garfield.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!garfield!andrew
From: andrew@garfield.UUCP (Andrew Draskoy)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: linus uucp bizarreness
Message-ID: <752@garfield.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Dec-83 19:32:27 EST
Article-I.D.: garfield.752
Posted: Thu Dec  8 19:32:27 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 9-Dec-83 17:56:28 EST
Organization: Memorial Univ. of Nfld., St. John's, Canada
Lines: 41


    A little while ago I was running mkpath on Rob Kolstad's uucp
routing data and discovered that there were two systems out there
who seemingly talked to garfield, that we at garfield didn't know
anything about.  Well, the net being what it is, this wasn't really
surprising.  I sent myself mail through them to make sure that they
really did talk to us, and ran into the following weirdness:

Akgua, which is apparently AT&T/Bell Labs/Whoever-they-are-now's
latest I-talk-to-everybody site does indeed call us.  That's ok, we
certainly won't object!  The second site, linus, is where the
bizarreness comes in:  If you mail to linus!garfield!user, linus
says "Ah yes, garfield...  I just send this through allegra" and the
path gets changed to linus!allegra!garfield!user.  Well, it's great
if linus knows what to do with mail to garfield, but it doesn't
really have a uucp connection to us, so I'm not so sure that it
should advertise that fact that it does.  I think perhaps optimization
of routes for mail that comes through linus towards us would be a better
idea.  Suppose for instance, that someone who can call system foo,
which talks to system bar which in turn talks to garfield, for $0.10
and linus for $0.20 wants to send me mail.  Presumably it will send
through the cheapest system (foo) if the number of hops to garfield
is the same.  (This is easy to set up with mkpath, just give it your
directly connected systems in reverse order of cost.)  But the number
of hops through linus is (it thinks) smaller, so the mail goes through
linus.  In fact the number of hops was the same, and someone just
lost $0.10.  All of this is besides the important question:  Do we
really want to add yet another level of comlexity to uucp routing?
Or is it new?  I haven't run across it before.

I'd like to hear other people's views on this, especially anyone who
knows what's going on (at linus, perhaps?)

One last note:  Has anyone else been added to akgua list of connections?
We don't have an L.sys entry for them, and were wondering about getting
one.  The problem is that there is no answer from akgua!{postmaster,usa},
the later being the contact for akgua listed in net.news.map.

--
Andrew Draskoy
{akgua, allegra, ihnp4, linus(sort of), utcsrgv}!garfield!andrew