Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Posting for the rest of us Message-ID: <9164@e.ms.uky.edu> Date: 4 May 88 16:09:06 GMT References: <1596@looking.UUCP> <4203@dasys1.UUCP> <12238@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1598@looking.UUCP> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 73 In article <1598@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >It's a hash lookup, after all. Quite fast. And you only have to keep the >domains. Hmmm... pre-supposing that hash lookups exist everywhere. Let me remind you that dbm doesn't exist on SysV. As for keeping only the domains? well, you're wanting us to check into our database for hostnames to check validity. How far down the domain name should we check? The first level? second level? What happens with naive installers of rn at a domain'd site? "rn" assumes a top-level domain name of "uucp" and sticks the output of /bin/hostname before that. This can easily become a From: david@ms.uky.edu.UUCP hmmm Then there's the rn installation at either lanl or lll which is generating Reply-to: user@a.UUCP I don't know if they're still doing that, the last time I remember seeing it was some months ago but the first time was a year before that. hmmm... Oh, it was "machine a" at some place. Also the style of how to do the lookup is different on different systems. Here I'd like to link in substantial parts of mmdf into news, this would give me access to a sizeable dbm based database plus access to the nameservers. But if this is to be done I'll probably have to do it myself. >For example ".att" ".arpa" ".bitnet" ".edu" ".com" etc. just need >that one entry for all sites underneath them, since these are maintained >domains with maintained mailers. Hah! You've obviously not ever lived on bitnet! While the names are controlled, the maintainence of mailers or even existance of mailers is a very questionable idea. There is a table maintained by the BITNIC which lists all the sites and various details about how to send mail to the site. Like, you send it with BSMTP to some MAILER@HOST. Or you punch it directly to the user. Or any number of possibilities. That's a lot of gaul to begin with to assume that every site knows all the different variations of sending mail. To make it worse the file is in some strange IBM format that I (as a Unix guru) know nothing about. This site is unable to make use of the information and thus isn't able to send mail into bitnet very well. Other sites must be in the same boat. We've been advertising in that file that we can receive BSMTP for 1 1/2 yrs now. We still get mail here that is directly delivered to the user bypassing the mailer. Sorry, I tend to rave about bitnet ... >I am glad some people are facing reliable mail. But I know, based on what >I see in net traffic, that a lot of people, myself included, are not. >Somebody saying, "gee, my mail usually makes it" is not a reason to do >nothing. I agree. On the other hand, "my mail makes it 90% of the time". -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- or: {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- Windowing... The Amiga has windowing. The Mac has windowing (echoes of <---- Jonathan Livingston Seagull: "Just flying? A mosquito can do that much!").