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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!ut-sally!im4u!milano!ncr-sd!greg
From: greg@ncr-sd.UUCP (Greg Noel)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Another reason to hate smail
Message-ID: <1305@ncr-sd.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Jan-87 19:08:51 EST
Article-I.D.: ncr-sd.1305
Posted: Thu Jan 15 19:08:51 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Jan-87 03:53:05 EST
References: <14239@amdcad.UUCP> <5484@ukma.ms.uky.csnet> <467@unicus.UUCP>
Reply-To: greg@ncr-sd.UUCP (Greg Noel)
Organization: NCR Corporation, San Diego
Lines: 29

In article <467@unicus.UUCP> emc@unicus.UUCP (Eric M. Carroll) writes:
>..... the address must
>be resolved into TWO things: a route and a *transport mechanism*. ....  Really
>what I need is a table that associates a domain to my prefered transport
>mechanism (ie resolve the physical network to be used), then does the routing 
>lookup inside the associated connection graph for that physical network.

We at NCR modified smail to do something like this.  But we used a trick to
embed the routing network directly into the pathalias output.  We just define
a connection to each physical network with a routing cost of HIGH; e.g.,
	ncr-sd	via-ethernet:(HIGH)
and then define our actual connections as originating in this artificial site:
	via-ethernet	neighbor(DEMAND)
(For external consumption, a script converts the via-ethernet to ncr-sd, so
the rest of the world sees the description in a reasonable way.)  The resulting
pathalias output for neighbor is:
	neighbor	via-ethernet:neighbor!%s
Our version of smail uses this line to invoke the ethernet mailer to send mail
to neighbor.  (If you don't specify a mailer, a default mailer is selected.)
The description of the mailer invocations is contained in a configuration file,
so it is easily changeable without recompilation (or sources, for that matter).
There is no default knowledge of the UUCP network; all such knowledge is in
the configuration file.

Before you ask, no, you can't get the modified smail from us.  But we have
sent the modifications to Larry Auton, so it might eventually see the light
of day in an official distribution.
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo    Greg@ncr-sd.UUCP or Greg@nosc.ARPA