Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!bbn!bbn.com!rsalz From: rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: What does "on the internet" mean -- to YOU? Message-ID: <1217@fig.bbn.com> Date: 18 Nov 88 16:05:07 GMT Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation Lines: 39 In <23667@pprg.unm.edu>, Kurt Zilenga writes >To me, on the Internet (note the capital 'I') implies you can hold some >form of IP conversation with SRI-NIC.ARPA (or some other major >ARPAnet/MILnet/NSFnet host). Okay, this sounds fine. > Being on an internet implies you talk IP (even >if just to yourself :-). Unh, this I disagree with. Two Sun's connected by SLIP ain't an internet. It's a LAN. If you've got Ethernet segments, or a gateway box, or something similar, then you've got an internet, if not you've got a LAN. An internet is an "interconnected network." Any large campus will have an internet, and any small shop will have a LAN. Note that most folks, as soon as they connect to the Internet, will have an internet, because they'll connect at one point and have that machine gateway into their LAN. >The terms I prefer to use in the context of mail is "directly attached" >"indirectly attached" to the Internet. What we really need to do >is get MX records for those hosts/sites not directly attached and blow >off the UUCP maps all together.... Well, kinda. It's hard to do. The handful of Internet folks willing to be MX forwarders must be willing to take on hundreds of connections (how many does UNM forward for? :-). Okay, this is an exaggeration. The other downside is that an it tends to mean that there's ONLY ONE mail path to a site. With UUCP, since I can specify routes, I can route around problems and get my mail through. With domains, I can't. The other alternative is "domain parks." An Internet site (eddie.mit.edu) acts as the MX forwarder for a domain (zone1.com) and it turns over all zone1.com mail to a largish UUCP site (mirror). This system works, as the real-life example in parens shows, but it's been less than wildly successful. I expect this is because of political problems people have with the UUCP project. /rich $alz -- Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net.