Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!apple!motcsd!xdos!doug
From: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Stuck with .UUCP forever?
Summary: Ok, but can't it be easy enough to convert everyone?
Message-ID: <311@xdos.UUCP>
Date: 18 May 89 22:55:34 GMT
References: <1046@ittg.UUCP> <3174@epimass.EPI.COM> <285@xdos.UUCP> <1728@fig.bbn.com>
Reply-To: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Organization: Hunter Systems, Mountain View CA (Silicon Valley)
Lines: 65

In article <1728@fig.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
>In <285@xdos.UUCP> doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt) writes:
>>Since all of your options are unsatisfactory to many people, you can
>>assume that ".UUCP" is never going to go away, at least not via those
>>options.

>Sure you can; you make it VERY WORTHWHILE for folks to join the standards...

Please don't misunderstand me, I very much like the idea of domain
naming becoming a *universal* standard. I'm just concerned about the
mechanics of the process.

>I haven't done it yet, but I might.  "If you wanna talk, speak my language."
>Does that make me an asshole?  Probably.  Do I care?  So far, yes, that's
>I haven't done it.

I appreciate that you care, and I don't think that your concerns make
you an asshole at all; it's an understandable temptation.

But look at the situation for poorly connected leaves (the situation I've
almost always been in myself). It's usually not easy at small companies
to scrape up the disk/modem/phone/manager-approval resources in the
first place. Once you do (for it's certainly worth the effort to keep
trying) you start asking around for a net link, and often are turned
down because "we're too small to support an outgoing feed" or because
"we're too large to support a leaf". You finally find a cooperative
link to the net, get the software set up, hurray, etc.

You try hard to make your software follow the standards, to have your
local users be informed about netiquette, etc. In general, you follow
all the rules to the best of your ability.

And then you find out that you're blowing it because you don't have
a domain address. Oops! What did I do wrong? Well, let's see, I can't
afford to talk to uunet, so that's out. (Ignorant thinking follows, not
having seen recent discussion in this group:) Gee, there's thousands of
other .UUCP folks out there too, but I want to do things "right". Yet I
can't afford to either link directly to Internet nor to call uunet. Now what?

Ok, now I've been informed that all I need is to dig up yet another
cooperative site (on the arpanet) to do mail forwarding for me. Sounds easy,
right? Well, judging by the number of "no's" I've gotten in past years for
a simple local uucp news feed (and sometimes even mail links!), that's
not necessarily going to be easy.

I guess I'll start trying to figure out who nearby might be willing to
cooperate, but can you see from the above why it is that there are so
many .UUCP leaves without a domain address???

My naive feeling about this is that a small technical solution
would solve it: what if there were a way to get a proper domain address
*without* requiring mail forwarding? Technically it seems like a reasonable
solution. All you need is for smart mailers (particularly at arpa gateways)
to understand how to send to e.g. doug@xdos.COM, right? And that general sort
of capability is already widespread. Naturally I would have to go through
some sort of procedure to get registered, and if it costs a bit (e.g. that
famous $35), no problem.

If it were that easy, then you could quite quickly get 95% of the .UUCP
sites to become part of the .COM domain. So why not? What am I missing???
	Thanks,
		Doug
-- 
Doug Merritt		{pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug
Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow		Professional Wildeyed Visionary