Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!vsi1!lmb
From: lmb@vicom.COM (Larry Blair)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Getting the most out of pathalias
Message-ID: <1347@vsi1.COM>
Date: 7 Jan 89 00:18:14 GMT
References: <601@ur-cc.UUCP> <23430@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: lmb@vicom.COM (Larry Blair)
Organization: VICOM Systems Inc., San Jose, CA
Lines: 52

In article <23430@apple.Apple.COM> fair@Apple.COM (Erik E. Fair) writes:
=arpatxt is a waste of time; you have to maintain a list of duplicate
=UUCP/and domain *component* names to prevent mis-routing when you try
=to use arpatxt (tedious manual work). Also, NIC HOSTS.TXT will
=eventually go away, and then where will you be? I've got a better hack
=which I will describe below.
=
=Since I like the Internet, I use it as much as I can. To encourage
=such usage (and cut back on the length of the UUCP paths generated by
=pathalias) I run pathalias twice over the UUCP maps before generating
=the dbm database used by sendmail. First pass is just for the raw
=maps. Then I run the pathalias output through an awk script called
="mkglue" that generates a sizeable glue file. Then run pathalias again
=over the raw maps with the glue file appended to the input.

I've been using Erik's mkglue script for about 4 months now.  Our
sendmail has not been hacked for path routing; we use smail.  We are
not on the Internet, so there were a few problems that came up.

One problem that came up was that we had to play some games to get the
domain based routes to go to our preferred Internet neighbor, while not
ending up with all mail to our other domained neighbors going through
that site as well.  To do this, we changed the cost of INTERNET in the
awk script from 1 to 2 and set up the Path.local file:

vsi1	preferred(9), other1(10), other2(10), etc.

Another problem came when we got ourselves registered in the .com domain.
Now vicom.com appeared in the INTERNET group, meaning that most paths now
ended up in that paths file as "%s".  To stop this, we commented out the
lines in the awk script that added our site to INTERNET.

While many of the paths produced appear shorter, they may not be, since
the hop from the Internet site to the forwarder doesn't show up.  It also
often means sending mail thru uunet unecessarily.  When I send mail to a
domainized site in the bay area that uses sun as their forwarder, it means
a slow trip.  Ideally, the non-Internet domained sites would be identified
by their forwarder, so that proper costing could take place.

Erik mentioned that he (and the other coordinators, he presumes) check the
map entries for accuracy re: domain aliases.  I have found that they are not
complete.  My particular complaint, made to the site admin at rice, but not
corrected, is that they _don't_ have rice = rice.edu in their map.
Unfortunately, cs.texas.edu lists a connection to rice.edu, creating an
unecessarily long path; one that I often use for retreiving archived materials.

All in all, there has been little bounced mail, though; certainly less than
I was getting before I started inverting the lists.  I've thanked Erik before
and do so once again.  Using this script has really made the usenet world
look a lot more like the Internet one.
-- 
Larry Blair   ames!vsi1!lmb   lmb@vicom.com