From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!zeppo!wheps!eagle!mhuxt!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Newsgroups: net.followup Title: Re: CSNet opinions? Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2427 Posted: Thu Jul 1 11:06:12 1982 Received: Fri Jul 2 02:03:31 1982 References: unc.3638 Steve's description of MMDF is interesting. I'm not all that familiar with it, but I've seen people tear out their hair trying to make it do things that delivermail does trivially. There are really three separate issues here. (1) CSNET as a network, (2) Phonenet as a file transfer protocol (as opposed to uucp), and (3) MMDF as a mail delivery system (as opposed to delivermail, or sendmail, or even /bin/mail.) You'll notice that CSNET isn't "as opposed to" anything, and I think they are doing a wonderful job there. UUCP leaves a LOT to be desired as a way to get files from one place to another. I'm not all that familiar with Phonenet, but it just about HAS to be better. My gripes about uucp include (1) no routing, (2) no robustness (files go into black holes), (3) security is done all wrong (you are as restricted for sending files as for retrieving them, and the program run on the other end runs as uucp, not you, and files show up owned by uucp instead of you), (4) it absolutely HAS to have an 8 bit communication path, and has to run in raw mode (thus clobbering response on your system), (5) horrible user interface (for example, there is no way in the world to run an "ls" or "who" on a remote machine). Steve says Phonenet does (2) well (hopefully for file transfer as well as mail) - I wonder how it does for the other areas? Now, MMDF vs sendmail is a different story. In my opinion, sendmail is 1000% better than MMDF, in fact, delivermail is somewhat better than MMDF, and sendmail is a quantum leap beyond delivermail. The major thing MMDF mail lacks is flexibility. Aliases are nearly impossible to create: if you want to be able to mail to "net.general" and have that fed into the newsgroup, you have to create an entry "net.general" in /etc/passwd (and hope the length and dot don't bother anything), make it a home directory, create a C program which runs system("recnews net.general"); and install that in some special file under net.general's home directory. In comparison, in delivermail you can just put net.general: "|recnews net.general" in /usr/lib/aliases and run newaliases - you don't even have to be a super user to do this, if you allow /usr/lib/aliases general write permission. In sendmail, you don't even have to run newaliases, as this is automatically done the next time mail goes through. The other problem with MMDF is one delivermail shares - there are 2 or 3 "channels" (delivermail has 6, I think) that are hard coded into the program. sendmail, on the other hand, runs completely off a configuration table. This means that you can run the SAME BINARY of sendmail on just about every 4.1BSD system in the world, no matter what networks it is on! Adding a channel is done by adding a line to /usr/lib/sendmail.cf. This file allows you to configure what nets are involved, what syntax is used for each net, what priority to parse networks at (e.g. how to resolve the ambiguous a!b@c), what to do to the headers as mail is passed through, whether to send one copy of a message across a link to be remotely mailed to several people from there, where all the appropriate gateways are, and so on. The name of the host can be used to make host sensitive decisions. There is an option to look up hosts for certain networks in the aliases file, so that routing can be done. I only had to add one line to the configuration file to support the user.host@network syntax, and when they changed that to user@host.network, I had to add one more line - now it understands both! The only real problems with sendmail are that the syntax of the configuration file is a bit cryptic if you don't deal with it every day, and if you have some kind of network with conventions and rules that the author did not anticipate, it will be necessary to go in and modify the code. While it's very well written and even excessively commented, sendmail is getting big enough to make it hard to find the part of the code to change. Also, it could use some additional log file capabilities (it has a logger, but it wants to write on a special /dev/log with something listening on the other end, and it doesn't log in much detail.) sendmail will be on 4.2BSD and is not available before then. (I'm a test site and am not supposed to give it to anyone else, so don't ask.) What I think I'd like to see is phonenet talking to sendmail. Sendmail will have no trouble with this, but phonenet might have MMDF assumptions in it (since many people refer to that software also as MMDF), and there is presumably some communication between the two for returning undeliverable mail. (As anyone who posts to unix-wizards knows, MMDF loves to return lots of verbose, annoying messages when somebody on the list's host goes down. sendmail does not address this issue either.) Mark