Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!pyramid!tolerant!kennedy
From: kennedy@tolerant.UUCP (Bill Kennedy)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Rerouting of explicit paths
Message-ID: <1376@tolerant.UUCP>
Date: 4 Mar 88 22:56:50 GMT
References: <327@vsi1.UUCP>
Reply-To: kennedy@tolerant.UUCP (Bill Kennedy)
Distribution: na
Organization: Tolerant Systems Inc., San Jose
Lines: 46

In article <327@vsi1.UUCP> lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair) writes:
>I am not in favor of rerouting a local user's explicit path for several well
>known reasons, the greatest of which are that you can't avoid a temporarily
>dead host and that when someone's local machine matches a name in the maps,
>you simply CAN'T mail to them.
>
>(FLAME ON!)
[ ... flame agreed but deleted ]

First, let me completely disclaim Tolerant, this is my opinion as SA of two
small remote sites, Tolerant is nice enough to let me use their equipment.

This is more than an irritation, particularly if your site, like mine, is
long distance from everything.  I coordinate a fairly sizeable (> 60 people)
mailing list and one of the things that we go through before anyone is put
on the list is verify that we have reliable email connections.  So catch this,
I pay LD to mail to a known-to-work path and some site gets smart, marks it
up and I get to pay LD again to have it bounce, then pay LD again to send it
via a worse path but to circle around the one who marked it up wrong.

I have two neighbor sites who do this and it's not only time, and stomach
acid, it's money!  *MY* money, not the university's.  If you don't think
that $50-$75 a month hurts, just send it to _me_ out of _your_ pocket starting
last month :-)

Could someone at one of those sites that re-routes everything please explain
the rationale?  Some of the stuff gets routed so that it takes *days* longer
to get where it's going than if it just went the way it was sent.  Why must
*everything* be re-routed?  Someone please convince me.
<My flame off>

>As far as rerouting mail sent through your site goes, this should be considered
>to be a no-no subject to immediate de-netting!  A user several hops away has
>no way to know that you are going to screw up his path.  If someone routing
>through your machine wants to generate a 20 hop path, that's his business, not
>yours.

I'll disagree with you here Larry, news reply paths are notoriously long,
sometimes circular, and frequently silly.  I have rn set up at each of my
sites to force a re-route, arbitrarily.  I will also route mail that is
sent without a bang path or to a bang path I can't reach.  Note that I said
that "rn" forces a re-route, not "rmail".  If you send me a 20 hop path, as
long as I talk to the next site in it I'll pass it but from time to time I
have been tempted...  Finally, if I can't route it I send it to rutgers, I
know _they_ will do something with it :-)

Bill Kennedy ...{rutgers,cbosgd,ihnp4!petro}!ssbn!bill or bill@ssbn.WLK.COM