Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pacbell!att-ih!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Rerouting of explicit paths
Message-ID: <2329@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 11 Mar 88 12:54:51 GMT
References: <327@vsi1.UUCP> <9@tness7.UUCP> <3544@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <11@tness7.UUCP>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 13

In article <11@tness7.UUCP> mechjgh@tness7.UUCP (Greg Hackney) writes:
>The path that netnews takes, is hardly ever the shortest
>path that pathalias would come up with. I've seen it routed
>all over North America just to get to the machine next door.
>
>If most of the sites did rerouting, a lot of time and money
>would be saved in my opinion. 

The right way to do this is to patch smail so it will reroute when it
sees a path that is longer than a threshold.  This will catch most
replies to the return path of a news article without affecting
manually-crafted paths.  This is how we do it here.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi