From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!CSvax:cak Newsgroups: net.followup Title: Re: UUCP Internet Addresses Article-I.D.: purdue.381 Posted: Mon Sep 20 13:12:06 1982 Received: Tue Sep 21 06:55:10 1982 References: populi.342 While I applaud your efforts to come up with a naming scheme for the uucp Internet name domain, I think you may be moving in the wrong direction. The point is that users should not have to know the subdomain, etc., of a site in order to get mail there; the sitename should be sufficient. Unfortunately, this means we have to have unique site names -- I agree that this is a problem. I think, however, that this can be handled in an ad hoc manner; a new site coming on line just won't be able to get mail, and will change its name. That's not the main point though. I think that it is foolish to expect every site to maintain a complete registry of available uucp site names; this happens to be necessary for Arpa Internet hosts now, but soon won't be. The direction the Internet is moving towards is a system of central nameservers, at least one for each naming domain, that know either a) how to tell you how to get to a site in that domain, or b) will forward mail to a site in that domain for you. Internet hosts are expected to maintain a cache of addresses locally, so as to minimize traffic to and from the nameserver, but this won't be necessary. I would suggest that uucp sites should move in the same direction. To send a letter, you would look in your local cache of names (which might have only one name in it -- your connection to the outside world) to see if you know the path to get there. If you don't, you hand off to your chosen forwarder, who presumably knows how to get everywhere. Every site applies this algorithm recursively. By maintaining a number of central sites that really DO know how to get everywhere (the set {ucbvax,harpo,decvax,pur-ee} is representative of this class of sites) with fairly up to date routing tables, things should work out pretty well. Some mechanism for updating a local cache is desirable; for example, a site that receives a letter to be forwarded might send a message back to the originating site indicating where it was forwarded to. Then the site could compare that forwarding site's name to its local list of connections, and update routing tables accordingly, thus cutting one hop off of its path. Very sophisticated distributed routing algorithms exist; we should make use of one of them. We really should try to view the uucp net as an Internet-like system, consisting of a number of subnets connected by gateways that are 'smart'. With some form of routing updates slowly propogating around the net, I think we can maintain some semblance of current connectivity information sufficient to implement speedy routing. I also welcome any and all comments, and will summarize them to the net (if they don't get posted there). Cheers, Chris Kent, Purdue CS