Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!mcvax!dik From: dik@mcvax.cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: JANET troubles Message-ID: <351@zuring.mcvax.cwi.nl> Date: Sat, 25-Apr-87 10:01:13 EDT Article-I.D.: zuring.351 Posted: Sat Apr 25 10:01:13 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 26-Apr-87 21:15:35 EDT References: <701@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <572@stracs.cs.strath.ac.uk> Reply-To: dik@zuring.UUCP (Dik T. Winter) Distribution: all Organization: CWI, Amsterdam Lines: 74 Keywords: JANET, UK, gateways, help! In article <572@stracs.cs.strath.ac.uk> jim@cs.strath.ac.uk writes: > In article <701@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> kagle@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu.UUCP (Jonathan C. Kagle) writes: > > > > For the past month or so, I have been trying to get in touch with a > >friend at The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. Unfortunately, the > >mail is swallowed somewhere along the way there. I can send mail to: > >username%uk.ac.st-and.sava@ac.uk with no positive (reply) or negative (error > >message) feedback from St. Andrews. I have tried to get through to the post- > >master/mistress, but I have recieved no reply. > > There are three main gateways into the UK. UKC have the uucp gateway, UCL > the arpa/csnet/x400 gateways and RAL have a gateway into BITNET/EARN. For > reasons of funding, neither UKC or UCL will forward mail for unauthorised > users. In the UK we have to pay the network bills for transatlantic traffic, (Same holds here, so we pay for reading the original message as for for sending this reply, but we do not complain.) > so if someone can't or won't pay their share of these costs, UCL and UKC have > not much option but to silently junk the mail. [This is not as bad as it seems; > all the UK UUCP sites are registered with UKC and pay up. There would be no > problem there, except the site you want to get to is not a UUCP site - it's > a VMS VAX. It's likely that if your mail ends up at UCL or UKC it goes to > /dev/null and you'll hear nothing about that fact.] > > Now the BITNET/EARN gateway is currently free - I think IBM have sponsored a > line till 1988. There shouldn't be any problem of authorisation there, at > least for now. > > The address you give is a little curious. You are asking for the mail to > be sent to "ac.uk" from your local machine. Where will your mail system > send this (if anywhere)? If it goes to the RAL gateway - called UKACRL > on BITNET/EARN - it should get through OK. > > The UK address you give is more or less correct, but could throw the gateway. > Firstly the address is in UK domain order. The RAL gateway (or some mailer > inbetween you and it) could swap the order round to RFC822 form. This could > upset the gateway if it expects addresses to be in one of either RFC822 or > UK order and gets presented with the other order. Secondly, the UK academic > network has two names for each site (and you thought swapping the domain > ordering was bad...)! These names are known as long and short form names, the > long form names being the standard "approved" ones. The gateway at RAL could > be fussy enough to only accept the standard form name. The address you gave > - uk.ac.st-and.sava - is the short form name. The standard form name is > uk.ac.st-andrews.sava. > > The gateways at UKC and UCL are clever enough to swap domain ordering around > and map between long and short names. In short, they hide the lunacy of the > UK naming scheme from the rest of the world. I don't know how well the RAL > gateway copes with this, if at all. Ask the postmaster there. As far as I know, the RAL gateway does also deal with these problems, although I think the preference is in the non-uk order (i.e. terminating with .ac.uk). > > My advice to you is first determine which gateway you used (or want to use) > and ask the postmaster there how mail addresses for the UK can be presented > to his/her mail system. From what you said, it sounds like your mail didn't > always make it to a gateway, so I'd suggest you trace what happens on the > path to the gateway and back to you. I think the mail may have gone to a gateway, but the wrong one. The EARN site (European part of bitnet) I just consulted tells me that mail to Janet is still gatewayed through UCL, although this is false (it is gatewayed through RAL). Now it may be that one of the intermediate sites still gateways it through UCL. You may have to send it to RAL by hand with a properly formatted mail message, although I do not know right know what that format is. I have ways to look it up though, but it may take some time. You might also ask the postmaster (that should be postmaster@ukacrl.bitnet). > > I don't think a UK gateway is at fault - they are quite good at returning > error/status messages, so I would suspect your path to the gateway is not > reliable. No, at least UKC will not return any error/status message, and I think UCL won't either. -- dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland INTERNET : dik@cwi.nl BITNET/EARN: dik@mcvax