Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!minya!jc From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Rerouting of explicit paths Message-ID: <489@minya.UUCP> Date: 21 Mar 88 05:14:53 GMT References: <327@vsi1.UUCP> <9@tness7.UUCP> <3544@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <532@fig.bbn.com> Organization: home Lines: 85 Summary: Gee, it works from here... In article <532@fig.bbn.com>, rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes: > >> A lot more time and money would be saved if everybody used news > >> compiled with INTERNET defined. Let's deal with the problem at it's > > >Well, I tried that on this machine, which has only SMTP connections, and > > [it didn't work] > > Not to be insulting, but I think your whole set up is suspect. I'm not insulted; I've suspected that for some time. With sendmail, I've learned that any setup is suspect. Most SAs I know admit to tweaking it until it works most of the time, and then LEAVE IT ALONE! Making it work takes a rather long time and much experimenting. Give me some more time, and maybe I'll get it right. Or I'll give up and find another wall to beat my head against. Or I'll install smail... > Look at the from line you generate: > From: jc@heart-of-gold (John M Chambers x7780 1E342) > without any domain information this is a totally useless address. Hey, you should have seen how the first few articles got labeled! Would you believe that Sun's sendmail defaults the domain to the Yellow Pages domain? Despite the fact that their manual staes quite clearly that YP domains are not related to mail domains? > I would have sent this to you privately, but I obviously couldn't. > I suppose I could have figured something out from the Organization and > the path: > Path: bbn.com!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!pasteur!ames!necntc!linus!heart-of-gold!jc > Organization: Mitre Corp, Bedford, MA, USA > but that's WRONG! In addition to being a gross waste of my time, there > are (at least) two technical reasons against doing this. Well, I got the article here on my home machine, so I went back and typed an 'R' command to vnews. It gave me the header: | To: adelie!necntc!linus!heart-of-gold!jc which is about as close to optimal as you could get. I looked at the article, and it could have used the "From " or the "Path:" lines to generate this. Granted, you got a longer path that wasn't quite as good. Responses to news ARE good candidates for autorouting. There is a bit of confusion at Mitre currently, over the proper use of domains. When internal politics clears up, you'll probably see a path from jc@heart-of-gold.mitre, but for the present, that's not a legal domain. Some machines there are foo.ARPA, but that's only legal for machines that are actually on the arpanet.... When the 'R' command gives me a very long path, I usually just tell vi to strip off most of it, up to a hostname that I recognize, or leaving the last 2 or 3. I converted my /bin/rmail to a script that first hands the mail to the /bin/rmail.real, and if that fails, bounces it to a nearby $SMARTHOST (adelie, in fact). So I get routing in that case. I don't find it much of a hassle; it's a lot less grief than is caused by all those smart routers causing my mail to bounce back. (:-) > >It's been said that something that works is preferable to something that > >fails. It's even more true that something that always works is preferable > >to something that always fails. (:-) > > Properly set up it works fine. Continuing the pithy quotes: > If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, no, it doesn't. The trouble is that the IP host tables have grown so huge that not even linus can store all of them. The news at heart-of-gold comes via a real jumble of networks. My mail was getting bounced 3 or 4 levels of SMTP mailers, and none of them could identify the end machines or guess how to get the mail closer. Some of them (such as linus) are major email clearinghouses, and they couldn't help. Sigh. > When all else fails, read the instructions. Ya also gotta be smart enough to understand them. If email is to make it in the real world, it's gotta be within the capabilities of dummies like me. (:-) > Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net. Please send more related clever sayings to me. Especially if you have pairs that say opposite things! (:-) I've gotten bored with the standard Unix fortune file, so I wrote my own utility, and I need to initialize it. (Anyone want a copy?) -- John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)