Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut!karl
From: karl@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Duplicate site names
Message-ID: <3606@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 30 Dec 87 05:46:50 GMT
References: <872@uop.edu> <3569@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <7036@rutgers.rutgers.edu>
Organization: OSU
Lines: 52
In-reply-to: pleasant@rutgers.rutgers.edu's message of 29 Dec 87 19:57:10 GMT


pleasant@rutgers.rutgers.edu writes:
   Why use a fully qualified name (domainized) in mail and not in news?!?

First, Mel, chill out.

   There are lots of sites which use the Path: header to generate return
   addresses when replying to news articles.  This happens when a news
   administrator chooses not to define INTERNET in his defs.h file - a valid
   thing to do when his system does not grok internet addressing!

Fine.  When a user at such a site replies to a Usenet message from
tut.cis.ohio-state.edu, the reply will go to a UUCP !-path that looks
something like
	To: some!set!of!hosts!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut!osu-username
which is just wonderful, fine, and dandy.  That path will find us,
every time.

   So, you
   cannot so easily divorce your news system from your mail system by
   attempting to claim that news is news and mail is mail where
   neither the two shall meet.

Where did I ever say that mail is divorced from news?  They meet very
often (indeed, my sendmail.cf believes in news in a fairly intimate
way), but this presents no problem.  The presence of "!tut!" in the
midst of a !-path is very well qualified around here - our Tut has
only 2 "UUCP" neighbors, and one of those is actually an NNTP
connection.  Sites that believe in domain addressing reach us
trivially.  Sites that don't believe in domain addressing reach us
with a !-path.

We have allowed news to continue to generate Path: lines containing
just "tut" instead of his full name because he's had his UUCP
configured for a Shere name of "tut" for quite a long time.  When we
installed news on Tut (all of maybe 4 months ago), we didn't want to
change that particular aspect of him; this fit well.

It only occurred to me this morning that this could cause problems in
Europe, because if the Finnish Tut (tut.fi, I think, but I wouldn't
swear to it just this instant) also uses a simplistic "tut" name for
Path: lines, then stuff posted on one Tut won't get propagated to the
other Tut; their respective news neighbors will notice that "tut" is
already in there, and decline to forward.  That's a problem.  But it's
got nothing to do with the ability of Joe Random out there on a
non-domain-addressing host being able to mail a reply to someone at
Ohio State.

Anyhow, I will take a look at your suggestions for getting our Tut to
generate fully qualified domain references to himself in the Path:
line, purely for the sake of ensuring proper article propagation
between whatever Tuts might be out there.
-- 
Karl