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