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From: casey@admin.cognet.ucla.edu (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: news.admin,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: The rebirth of USENET
Message-ID: <13758@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 22 Jun 88 04:11:53 GMT
References: <585@cbnews.ATT.COM> <1100@bellboy.UUCP> <3095@palo-alto.DEC.COM>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: casey@admin.UUCP (Casey Leedom)
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In article <3095@palo-alto.DEC.COM> vixie@palo-alto.DEC.COM (Paul Vixie) writes:
> In article <1100@bellboy.UUCP> hack@bellboy.UUCP (Greg Hackney) writes:
> # In article <585@cbnews.ATT.COM> mark@stargate.COM (Mark Horton) writes:
> # > Mail into and out of AT&T through the "att" gateway will continue.
> # > Comments?
> # 
> # Only if it is from an AT&T site, or whose final destination
> # is an AT&T site (from what I understand).
> 
> There are actually going to be three separate 'att' machines in three
> different cities.  And mail sent x!att!y will work, even if x and y
> are both non-AT&T sites.  I think AT&T's plan is basically to disallow
> mail along x!att!another-att!yet-another-att!y, that is, they'd rather
> not have their internal network used for non-AT&T traffic.
> 
> I don't blame them.  Most companies have a well-connected gateway which
> forwards vast multitudes of local and some long distance traffic --
> between the gateway's non-company neighbors -- in addition to being
> the point of contact between all internal sites and all external sites.
> ... Again, AT&T seems to be saying: use our machine, but not our internal
> network.  And given the business they're in, that makes great sense to me.

  Someone quite correctly pointed out that Mark's letter seems to imply
that x!att!y will be bounced, but it doesn't really matter one way or the
other.

  Even if x!att!y will be allowed, Paul's argument falls down because it
states that it's perfectly ok for AT&T to say ``We're not going to let
people to use our internal network links.'', and [implicitly] that it's
ok for AT&T to use USENET's internal network links (USENET is of course
not owned by a single organization, but it is an informal COOP).

  Why should a user on site "att" be able to send messages to X!Y!Z using
the network links between X and Y, and Y and Z?  X, Y, and Z may belong
to the same organization or separate organizations, but they may all be
considered to belong to the virtual USENET organization.

  According to Paul's argument, the AT&T user shouldn't be allowed to do
this because that user would be using internal network links within an
organization (i.e. USENET).  As it turns out, cooperative message
exchange is the entire business of USENET and so X!Y!Z *is* ok.  What
AT&T is proposing is that they drop most of their message carrying duties
in the cooperative message exchange, but still retain full membership
rights with regards to their own message loading.

  Again, if AT&T were a poor site without much money or traffic, network
charity would be the name of the game.  But AT&T is not deserving of such
charity.

  I don't want to knock the job that AT&T UUCP sites and their
administrators have done, but it was they who took on those untold number
of links.  If the load is too heavy, they should either cut back on the
number of links and still remain full partners in USENET, or, if they
want to be a leaf node, they should subscribe to uunet just like anyone
else.

Casey