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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbatt!ukma!david
From: david@ukma.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Another reason to hate smail
Message-ID: <5516@ukma.ms.uky.csnet>
Date: Fri, 16-Jan-87 11:59:55 EST
Article-I.D.: ukma.5516
Posted: Fri Jan 16 11:59:55 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Jan-87 06:52:36 EST
References: <14239@amdcad.UUCP> <5484@ukma.ms.uky.csnet> <467@unicus.UUCP>
Sender: news@ukma.ms.uky.csnet
Reply-To: david@ukma.ms.uky.csnet (David Herron, NPR Lover)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 38

In article <467@unicus.UUCP> emc@unicus.UUCP (Eric M. Carroll) writes:
>david@ukma.ms.uky.csnet (David Herron, NPR Lover) writes:
> 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.
>That way, if a site or gateway is a member of more than one physical
>network, it can have a priority scheme of how to send things.

interesting ... this is very nearly what MMDF does ...

In MMDF you first have a group of tables describing the known domains.
There's some additional code to help in finding partial cases (for
instance, if you just say "seismo" to mmdf and you have a .css.gov
table which says "seismo" in it you'll find seismo.css.gov -- it finds
the first instance in the first table).

The domain tables relate an arbitrary name to an official name...
That is, you can have a uucp domain table entry which says
"seismo: seismo.css.gov" meaning that you know about seismo.uucp
which is really seismo.css.gov.

The other half is in the channel tables ... A channel program is
associated with each physical medium over which you can route mail.
To each channel you attach a table which says which domains you
can send mail to through that channel.  To continue the example,
there's an entry in the uucp channel saying "seismo.css.gov: cbosgd!seismo!%s".

You can mention the domain name in multiple channels if you like ...
Normally it chooses the first channel which mentions the the domain name,
however there is an authorization feature which blocks users/hosts from
sending mail through certain channels.  (I don't know enough about
this feature (yet) to really know how it works).
-- 
-----   David Herron,  cbosgd!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET, david@ms.uky.csnet
-----           (also "postmaster", "news", "netnews", "uucp", "mmdf", and ...)
-----                             (and the Usenet map maintainer for Kentucky.)
-----       "Don't put your money in South Africa -- Give it to me!" -- Cerebus