Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Pathalias vs reality Message-ID: <2240@bsu-cs.UUCP> Date: 1 Mar 88 04:46:28 GMT References: <3008@fluke.COM> Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 36 Keywords: pathalias maps In article <3008@fluke.COM> jeff@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Stearns) writes: >For example, I'd like pathalias to understand that my path.local file always >has precedence over anything posted to comp.mail.maps. I furthermore expect >that most other sites would wish this as well. Is this thinking correct? If >so, how do others handle the situation? It seems like such a common scenario; >is there a clean solution? It would be nice if one could say pathalias u.* d.* -override path.local and have everything in path.local supersede all corresponding info in the other files. But right now, the only way to supersede information from one file is to show a lower cost for a route in another file. Usually you will want to give a local link a slightly higher or lower cost than the current published maps. You can force such local changes to override the published maps by lowering the costs of ALL your local links to an abnormally low value, so they always override the published values, and then adjusting these as necessary. Then all that matters is the relative weights of your local links to each other. For example, if you are site X and you talk to A, B, and C, you could say: X A(10), B(10), C(8) These are extraordinarily low costs, but their relative weights are all that matter, and you will route most or all traffic through C regardless of what the maps say. In the above example, if you changed B(10) to B(50), it would be nearly the same as marking B as dead, even if the published cost to B was quite low. The artificially-low costs to A and C override the relatively high cost to B. Note that the rest of the world never knows about these artificial costs and is unaffected by them and relies only on the published maps. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: !{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi