Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!oliveb!tymix!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: Stuck with .UUCP forever? Message-ID: <3243@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 28 May 89 17:17:21 GMT References: <1728@fig.bbn.com> <3790007@eecs.nwu.edu> <320@xdos.UUCP> <622@whizz.uucp> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 27 In article <622@whizz.uucp> bbh@whizz.uucp (Bud Hovell) writes: >Mel, I'm frankly a little confused (by my own ignorance, I'm sure), but is >the problem of setting up a .uucp domain primarily technical, or - as I tend >to infer from your note - primarily political? I'm not Mel, but I'll give it a shot. There are both technical and political problems -- the political problems are more of an economic nature, as in Who Pays The Bills.. Yes, the powers that be COULD declare .uucp an official domain, but that would effectively halt the momentum towards the domain conversion of UUCP sites and greatly increase the load on official gateways -- would we have MX records for *.uucp pointing to uunet exclusively, generating large bills for uunet's paying customers to send mail to folks two hops away? Or twist the arms of folks at six or seven sites and try to get some load balancing? Instead, the requirement of a forwarder for each domain in the "UUCP Zone" tends to ensure that no one is being forced to pay for traffic they haven't agreed to. The technical problem is that the "UUCP domain" namespace is flat -- one list must be kept with all the thousands of names, and it must be kept free of duplicates. The list is large enough that errors sometimes creep in (which is why agressive rerouters are so evil, Mel :-). On the other hand, I can name a new PC or workstation here sierra.epi.com or toy-pc.epi.com without having some remote bureaucracy approve, because I'm the domain administrator. -- -- Joe Buck jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck