Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!tikal!sigma!bill
From: bill@sigma.UUCP (Bill Swan)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Possible Duplicate Site cygnus?
Message-ID: <1703@sigma.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jun 88 17:39:04 GMT
References: <1293@kodak.UUCP>
Reply-To: bill@sigma.UUCP (me)
Distribution: na
Organization: The Seattle Piping Society
Lines: 30

In article <1293@kodak.UUCP> dennett@kodak.UUCP (Charlie Dennett) writes:
>Below is a bounced mail message that tried to go through a machine (cygnus)
>that I administer here at Eastman Kodak.  I'm not 100% sure how to read all
>the path and addressing information, but it seems to me that some machine
>along the way thinks there is another machine called cygnus. [...]

It is possible for a machine to not have a map entry and still show up in
routing info. I ran into this when I was going to name my home system
"cygnus" (a natural for someone named "Swan"), but discovered that there
was another machine by that name already connected.

All that is necessary is for somebody to show a link to that machine in
their map file. In this case "uuhosts" showed no entry for a machine named
"cygnus", but "uupath" gave a path to it!

Although registering and entry in the maps should show conflicts, if a new
machine comes on the net and fails to register, it's left to their neighbours
to find out if there's a conflict. 

I've run into this recently with "telesis", a neighbour here, but also the
name of a machine elsewhere. Apparently some uucp-files have been misrouted
to our site awaiting delivery to the nearby telesis (which is now dead). 

(I have updated our map entry, and if the neighbouring telesis ever comes
up again I will inform him of the name conflict.)

--Bill Swan

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