Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!decvax!decwrl!ucbvax!ucsd!rutgers!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Routing mail through Digital's sites Keywords: they're both right, er, wrong, er ... Message-ID: <10030@g.ms.uky.edu> Date: 24 Jul 88 17:47:37 GMT References: <616@bacchus.DEC.COM> <10005@e.ms.uky.edu> <4930@zodiac.UUCP> <10022@e.ms.uky.edu> <4166@umix.cc.umich.edu> <631@bacchus.DEC.COM> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Distribution: na Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 62 In article <631@bacchus.DEC.COM> reid@decwrl.UUCP (Brian Reid) writes: >The problem is that pathalias believes what you tell it. yeeeah... good ol' garbage in / garbage out. >A small amount of >bad data can create a large amount of havoc. Until the data is centrally >controlled, with someone responsible for errors, then I don't want my mta's >doing any form of routing unless I explicitly ask them to do it for me. > >If I could be confident that the contents of mod.maps was mostly true, I >would be happy to let the mta take over almost all routing. well now ... I don't see as to how we could ever get centrally maintained maps without having to pay someone. But I dare say that even if we did find someone to pay, and have some way of paying them, that they wouldn't be able to keep the map any better up-to-date than the current group does. At what size did the arpanet people start complaining about the "size of the net"? I know that bitnet people have been having trouble maintaining their file for a couple of years -- the most recent map for bitnet is right at 2500 nodes. The Usenet maps contain some 6000+ nodes right now. (At least, the pathalias output from the map is that long -- there's likely a number of aliases in there). [Holy sheep **** batman! I just took a look at the length of the pathalais output -- 14000 lines!] With that many sites in Usenet the connectivity is going to be far too unstable to be able to predict routes with ANY good degree of reliability. As I see it the only solution is to make a drastic change. Unfortunately Usenet doesn't have the luxury of 56+kb lines running all over the place over which to do nameservers .. In order to have a manageable centrally-managed table it would have to be of a reasonable size. At a guess I'd say that the upper limit for that is ~1000 entries. That's enough room for an entry for all the "important" cities [note that I'm writing from a smallish city] plus the major companies & universities. [How many entries are in the current d.* files?]. We'd have to encourage the domain entries to coordinate within 2nd level domains to make sure that there is ONE entry for each 2nd level domain which wants a gateway (which wouldn't limit them from having >1 gateway, but so long as there is ONE entry then things will be fine). But mapping this onto UUCP names isn't going to be easy at all. I think the solution lies over towards regional domains. You set up a regional domain, announce gateway(s) to that domain and don't announce any site names (other than necessary) within the domain to the outside world. The general idea works well with other domains -- the difference here is that there is no already existing organizations for the regions to handle the setting up and such. -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- A misplaced Kansan trapped in the heart of Kentucky, <---- the state where it is now illegal to water your lawn on the wrong day.