Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84 SMI; site sun.uucp
Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!decwrl!sun!guy
From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.micro.att
Subject: Re: mailing to other systems with the 7300
Message-ID: <2504@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 27-Jul-85 07:12:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.2504
Posted: Sat Jul 27 07:12:19 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Jul-85 06:22:31 EDT
References: <625@astrovax.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 26

> it is mentioned that while other system names may have up to nine
> letters, only the first six are significant. Is there any way to fix or
> get around this? Were the 7300 designers really so careless?

Blame where blame is due; it's not Convergent's fault.  UUCP's queue is
implemented as files in a spool directory (or directories).  The queue entry
is basically the directory entry, with the attributes of the entry encoded
in the name.  Except in 4.[23]BSD, file names are limited to 14 characters.
One of the attributes of the entry is the name of the remote host.  7
characters are already spoken for, which leaves 7 characters for the host
name.  The System V UUCP grabbed an additional character which meant that
there were only 6 characters for the host name.

The "nine letters" comes from the PWB/UNIX system call (propagated into
Systems III and V) to obtain the current host name from the operating system
(but I'll bet that the *real* value is eight, not nine; the character array
into which the name is returned is probably really eight characters - a nice
power of two - plus a NUL terminator).  Other versions of UNIX have
different limitations.  I don't know what the limit, if any, was in V7,
where the "current" version of UUCP first appeared (UUCPs presently running
are descendants of the V7 one).  The reason why it says 6 in one place and 9
in another is that the two bits of code were designed by different people as
parts of different versions of UNIX.  The 7300 merely inherited those two
bits of code; its designers are blameless.

	Guy Harris