Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!decwrl!palo-alto!vixie From: vixie@palo-alto.DEC.COM (Paul Vixie) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: Can someone explain the relationship between domains and uucp? Message-ID: <3354@palo-alto.DEC.COM> Date: 8 Jul 88 20:40:36 GMT References: <1830@stpstn.UUCP> <2254@epimass.EPI.COM> <568@bnlux0.bnl.gov> Reply-To: vixie@volition.UUCP (Paul Vixie) Organization: DEC Western Research Lab Lines: 49 In article <568@bnlux0.bnl.gov> abrams@bnlux0.UUCP (Karl L. Abrams) writes: # In article <2254@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: # > : # > : # >Provided that the host is on the UUCP map, Internet folks can mail # >to site.UUCP by mailing to site.UUCP%uunet.uu.net . This will fail # >if the site is not on the map. Note that site.uu.net is equivilent to site.uucp%uunet.uu.net, since uunet's mailer will treat them more-or-less identically. It's not just for customers of uunet, though you'd need to be a customer of uunet to actually _register_ a host.uu.net name in the uucp map. # My site is on INTERNET and has a UUCP connection also. Given that # we can reach UUCP sites via INTERNET, is it useful for a site like mine to # bother with maintaining UUCP maps and pathalias? Yes, it's useful. If you depend on Internet alone, you are only going to be able to reach people who've registered their UUCP hosts with the NIC (either in .US or through the UUCP project or by approaching the NIC directly). And when you send those people mail, it'll go via Internet SMTP to the UUCP site's MX, then from there over UUCP to get to the site itself. This can be slow, depending on how well the Internet is working that hour, and on how fast (and how direct) the link is between the MX and the UUCP host. If you have a direct (or indirect but low-latency) link toward the UUCP host that was pure UUCP, it _could_ be faster in some situations. Telebit modems make this more and more common. Also, if the UUCP host you are trying to reach is not registered with the NIC, they won't have an MX record in any case. To reach these (if you want to), you need to either: know a full route from you to them and give it in the user agent (or alias it in the user agent); pass everything you don't understand to a smarter host (like uunet); or run pathalias yourself. I prefer to run pathalias myself, since I can then decide immediately whether a message is deliverable or not. If you boot every unknown up to a smarter host, it takes longer for the originating user to find out that he misspelled (sp?) a host name. It also causes needless net activity. Note that only the main mail hub of your domain needs to run pathalias; it would become the "smart host" for the rest of your domain. This does not cause the above problems because the mail hub is usually reachable on a local ethernet. -- Paul Vixie Digital Equipment Corporation Work: vixie@dec.com Play: paul@vixie.UUCP Western Research Laboratory uunet!decwrl!vixie uunet!vixie!paul Palo Alto, California, USA +1 415 853 6600 +1 415 864 7013