Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!cadre!pitt!darth!formtek!ditka!kls
From: kls@ditka.UUCP (Karl Swartz)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Rerouting of explicit paths
Message-ID: <202@ditka.UUCP>
Date: 9 Mar 88 21:56:18 GMT
References: <327@vsi1.UUCP>
Reply-To: kls@ditka.UUCP (Karl Swartz)
Organization: Pittsburgh Fish Hackery, Pittburgh, PA
Lines: 33
Summary: Can't get here from there

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.

One of the guys at formtek (my office) had a friend who's sole
connection to the world was via harvard.  Apparently, harvard
would either auto-route or send everything to rutgers to auto-
route.  The path that this guy's mail tried to take to us was
something like

    harvard!rutgers!seismo!sun!cadre!idis!formtek!user

Unfortunately, one of those links was dead about 98% of the time
(names will be omitted to protect the guilty from embarrasment)
and thus this guy could not get mail to us.  Period.

>I propose that a new field be added to the map entry where sites that reroute
>other people's mail indicate so.  Pathalias should be changed to accept an
>option that only uses these sites as a last resort (since I found out that
>rutgers is rerouting, I changed their map entry to show all their connections
>as DEAD).

Or you can just declare *rutgers* to be dead, or at least tell
pathalias to avoid rutgers.  Unfortunately, most things seem to
want to go that way, and avoiding rutgers (from here, at least)
leads to some *really* bizarre routings.
-- 
Karl Swartz		|UUCP	decvax!formtek!ditka!kls
1-412/937-4930 office	|	{floyd,pitt,psuvax1}!idis!formtek!ditka!kls
			|BIX	kswartz
"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."  (Twain)