Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: news.newsites Subject: Re: Map addition for u.usa.ny.1, a new site: "entire". Message-ID: <3094@phri.UUCP> Date: 30 Dec 87 17:18:08 GMT References: <3121@entire.xerox.com> <1777@epimass.EPI.COM> <2613@killer.UUCP> Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY) Lines: 58 Keywords: new site, map approval: working Summary: why PC's shouldn't be in the maps, and ways around it. In <1777@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: > Sorry, but we can't very well have every PC in the world on the UUCP map. In <2613@killer.UUCP> billw@killer.UUCP (Bill Wisner) replies: > What an incredibly obnoxious statement. The mere fact that someone runs > UNIX on a small computer condemns them forever to forego representation > in the UUCP map? I think it's just a matter of practicality. The maps are already pretty big, and getting bigger all the time (a typical day sees 3 or 4 new sites announcing themselves; that's 1000 a year). The Internet underwent this growing pain a while ago, switching from an all-inclusive hosts file to hierarcial name servers. Clearly that is the intent of the uucp mapping project as well. It seems to me that the only practical thing to do for single-user home PC's would be to have some larger site which is in the maps to agree to forward mail for them. Granted, it is not always easy to find someone who will forward mail for you. We used to hand out uucp links pretty freely. Now, I spend some time thinking "do we really want to talk to this site?" before I agree. If the proposed link is for a home PC, I almost always say "No" because I've been seen too many sites badly run by part-time SA's, causing me unending trouble at this end. No, I'm not saying that all home PC's are sloppily run, or even most, but I've been burned so many times I've learned to stay away from the fire. Offering to pay my phone bills is nice, but impractical and non-sequitur; it's not the few 10-cent phone calls that bother me, it's the time spent cleaning up (ever have to wade through literally hundreds of mail messages about malformed uux requests?) In a dense area (such as New York City) it might make sense for a bunch of single user sites to band together and designate one of them as the mail funneler to be shown in the maps as a domain; I could see sending mail to foo@bar.nyc-pc.com and hand off mail to the other sites. Perhaps it would be appropriate for the local Unix groups (such as Unigroup of New York) to operate this service for their members. In fact, I think given the lack of security in UUCP, it would be possible (actually, pretty trivial) for several physically distant PC's to masquerade as a single UUCP site (which could be in the map); each would call the common feed periodically and pick up everthing addressed to the pseudo-site. It would keep what was really meant for it and forward the rest to the other sites. On the other end, the forwarder would simply need to maintain several L.sys lines for the pseudo-sites; each would correspond to a different phone line with a different PC; whichever one answers first would announce itself as the pseudo-site. One could even imagine the SA at the feed site for this pseudo-site not even being aware he was talking to more than one PC (assuming he didn't get suspicious about the varied phone numbers). There might be some subtle problems with simultaneous conversations to different PC's which are part of the same site, but I think the standard built-in UUCP locking mechanism would deal with this. UUCP meets distributed computing! Oh, and before somebody jumps on me, by PC I mean the generic concept of a Personal Computer, be it an IBM-PC or your own personal Vax. -- Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016