Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 alpha 5/22/85; site cbosgd.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!gatech!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: How to put UUCP hosts into world domain tree?
Message-ID: <1469@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Sep-85 01:11:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.1469
Posted: Wed Sep 11 01:11:42 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Sep-85 22:11:26 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Oh
Lines: 84

The first distribution of the UUCP project mail router will be
posted to the net soon.  In order to install it, you have to have
a domain name that fits into the world domain tree.  We need to
be making a final decision about how to position our systems.

We're currently using subdom.UUCP as our position.  However,
we're running into some problems with existing sendmail.cf files
(as distributed in 4.2BSD and Sun UNIX) and the top level domain name
UUCP.  Here's what happens.

We send out mail conforming to the standard, looking like this:

	From: mark@cbosgd.ATT.UUCP (Mark Horton)

It's received by other systems, which feed it through sendmail.
Sendmail has a production that recognizes

	user@host.UUCP

and translates it into

	host!uucp

Unfortunately, due to a bug in their sendmail.cf, if "host" is a
dotted subdomain like "cbosgd.ATT" it still does the translation,
and gets

	cbosgd.ATT!mark

This in itself might be OK if it translated it back later.  However,
what it seems to do is pass it in this bang notation along to subsequent
hosts in the route, or drop it in local mailboxes looking like either

	From: cbosgd.ATT!mark
or rarely
	From: mark@cbosgd.ATT

In the meantime, I suspect that due to the widespread distribution
of this bug, and since (I think) it's in 4.3BSD and in Sun 2.0, both
of which are very recent major releases, it seems like it would be
very difficult to get the fix to this widely installed.  Unless someone
has a better idea, I think we may be forced to avoid the name UUCP as
a top level domain, and fit into the name space somewhere else.
Possibilities include:

(1) renaming UUCP, calling it, say, UU or SMAIL or something else.
    This would leave the name UUCP for the explicit purpose of
    indicating a call to uux.  (Suggestions for the name, should
    we do this, are welcome.)

(2) do nothing.  We essentially depend on the fact that the name UUCP
    is built into the smail software as a default, so that cbosgd.ATT
    is treated the same as cbosgd.ATT.UUCP.

(3) fit into the ARPA organizational space, with names like cbosgd.ATT.COM
    and ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU.  This might not be hard, given the facilities
    of smail and pathalias, but we do not have official permission from
    ARPA to do this, and they have not been moving quickly to
    resolve the problem.  (Since they keep the registries for EDU,
    COM, GOV, MIL, and ORG, we would have to register with them.)

(4) fit into the MHS (X.400) name space, or some reasonable mapping of it.
    This means that the top level is always a two letter country code,
    and the level under that would be somewhat ad-hoc (they seem to be
    moving in the direction of the organization at the next level, but
    they don't require org names to be unique, and this isn't really
    standardized yet.)  This seems to be very close to what the parts
    of UUCP outside the USA and Canada want to do anyway.  We might have
    subdivisions under US and/or Canada, those subdivisions might be
    EDU, COM, and GOV, or they might be 8 or so geographic subdivisions,
    or they might be the organizations themselves (if we can convince
    ourselves we're really capable of handling that,) or they might be
    the Administration Management Domain required by X.400 (this is
    basically the name of the common carrier, e.g. telco, through which
    the domain can be reached.) We would also have to share this name
    space, each country would have to work it out with their appropriate
    administration domain (this usually means the phone company, but in
    the US it isn't clear who it means, perhaps the State Dept in the
    Federal Government.)

We're very close to having the software ready to send out, but this may
slow us up.

	Mark Horton