Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!husc6!ncar!woods
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Short-circuiting bang paths
Message-ID: <3144@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 3 May 89 20:19:08 GMT
References: <3048@tank.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 33

In article <3048@tank.uchicago.edu> matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) writes:
>I'm sure the quick and popular answer to this problem is "when the
>listed first hop is a valid connection, take it."  But I could counter-
>argue that the mail exchanger for the target site was poorly chosen if
>my own site is closer to the target than the exchanger is.

  This is another of the practical vs. ideal arguments. As maintainer of
one of the sites in question, there is an MX record out there that points
*.fidonet.org to my machine. The only service I perform for Fidonet is
to convert domain addresses to bang paths. I do not have any physical 
connections to Fidonet at all. This means someone mails to
user@whatever.fidonet.org, my mailer converts this to a bang path to the
appropriate UUCP-to-Fido gateway (found from UUCP map data), and mails
it out. From what I can see, there are over a dozen such gateways,  and
each gateway can itself gateway to dozens of Fidonet hosts. To do this
the "right" way would require possibly hundreds of MX records. In
addition to that, these MX records would have to be maintained by someone
else who is providing name server service for fidonet.org (who may or may
not themselves be connected to Fidonet). It isn't likely that they could
find someone who would volunteer to provide this service under those
conditions. Nor would I be willing to do routing if I had to maintain
all the info myself. As it happens, they maintain their own info by
publishing UUCP map entries for the various hosts. This means that those
who benefit do the real work. It's practical this way and impractical
to do it any other way.
  Then we get back to the religious war over whether aggressive rerouting is
a good thing or not. No point in arguing it; there are lots of well-respected
people on both sides of the issue. I got around the problem by simply
deleting oddjob from my list of connections (by putting the -d oddjob flag
on pathalias, which will prevent the generation of routes through oddjob
from this site; the physical link still exists). End of mail loop.

--Greg