Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!ames!pyramid!csg From: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Internet Paths in UUCP Maps -- Can We Stop? Message-ID: <25756@pyramid.pyramid.com> Date: 2 Jun 88 20:44:06 GMT Article-I.D.: pyramid.25756 References: <25550@pyramid.pyramid.com> <300@ncar.ucar.edu> <9512@e.ms.uky.edu> Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA Lines: 55 Summary: Second Try Well, every followup and mail reply I've gotten has misunderstood what I was proposing, so it must have been pretty awful. (I dunno, made sense to me. :-)) Let me try again. And please, don't construe this is a flame at Rutgers or Ames; they're two of our best links, and I respect Mel Pleasant's judgement a *lot*. I just want to raise an issue that I think is more important than the latest about JJ, and see what other SysAdmins think. First, I'm only talking about eliminating sites, not domains. Adding domains to the UUCP maps has worked miracles in connectivity. Second, I'm only talking about eliminating sites on fully connected networks, that are directly accessible from hundreds of sites on the Arpanet or Milnet. Sites that are in the hosts table, so MX records aren't an issue. (I'll bet Greg lunch that there aren't more than a dozen sites in the UUCP map that have Arpanet or Milnet access and aren't in the host table. See you at USENIX? :-)) What I'm trying to avoid are two types of pathalias funnies: paths that take long distance UUCP hops when a local call would do, and paths that prefer a multiple-hop Internet link when an adjacent UUCP link would do. Take princeton (aka princeton.princeton.edu) as an example. I would like to be able to route to them via decwrl, sun, ames, or one of the other local Arpanet or Milnet sites of my chosing. But because princeton is in rutgers' UUCP Map, and we give rutgers a low cost because it is an important link, pathalias wants to route to princeton via rutgers. As an example of the reverse, we have a direct UUCP link to ut-sally. Ames lists ut-sally(DEDICATED) on their UUCP Map, so pathalias choses the call to ames and a hop on the Milnet (through the Mil/Arpa gateway?) instead of the direct UUCP link. The only way to avoid this is to inflate the cost for ames, or use an unnaturally low cost for ut-sally. (I submit that this problem is much trickier, and certainly much more arguable. I mean, the hop via ames honestly is the cheapest.) The alternatives are to either list all Internet sites in the maps for every site that has Internet access, or list none of them and let the (preferably top-level) domains handle the routing. The former is impractical; there are almost 6500 nodes in the latest host table. That's why I'm proposing the latter. An additional possibility would be for Arpa or Milnet sites that have UUCP map entries to list a reasonable cross-section of other Internet/UUCP gateway sites in *their* maps; for example, the princeton map would contain: decwrl .princeton.edu rutgers .princeton.edu ucbvax .princeton.edu or something similar. In fact, I am doing this locally for domains that I am sure are physically on Arpa or Milnet; but that does nothing for our neigh- bor's paths, and still leaves the Internet-overrides-UUCP routing problem. Am I making sense now? Can we try this again?