Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!ukma!david
From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: UREP help sought
Message-ID: <9830@g.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 5 Jul 88 14:31:42 GMT
References: <579@n8emr.UUCP> <403@cseg.uucp>
Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 39

In article <403@cseg.uucp> lag@cseg.uucp (L. Adrian Griffis) writes:
>My understanding is that most BITNET sites have a map of the rest of
>the network.  I'm not a POSTMASTER, but I believe there is a distribution
>list for such a map and most POSTMASTERs subscribe.  I don't know if you
>can subscribe from UseNet, but I suspect you can get some postmaster
>somewhere to send a copy.

Yes there is a map.  I don't know exactly how I got on the distribution
list, I think it has to do with one of the entries in the site entry
for this place but it's been well over a year since I've done anyting
with site entries and I don't remember ANY details.  All the map is
is a routing table -- for that node you send the file to this neighbor
of yours.  Each site has a similar table.  It works but isn't wonderful.
Also it's kind of boring here because we're a leaf site -- every
other site on BITNET is on the other side of UKCCB ...

There's another table that's more interesting.  But it's very large
and I don't know of any documentation describing its internal format.
Not that it's very hard to read anyway, but writing a program to
decode things out of it would be slightly hard.  Anyway, it's got
a name like BITEARN NAMES or some such, and is available through
your country-wide NETSERVer.  (For the USA, it's the one at BITNIC).

>There is normally an alias called POSTMAST for the POSTMASTER's id
>at a particular node, so you should be able to send a request to
>"POSTMAST@UGA" for such a list.  From UseNet, the address should be
>"POSTMAST@UGA.bitnet".   ...

THis is almost correct.  It's not "normally" installed.  Again, there
is a tag in that more interesting table which says who to send postmaster
type mail to.  You have to be able to look it up in that table in order
to know who to send mail to.  *THERE*ISN'T*A*STANDARD*NAME*TO*SEND*TO*!
Well, nor is there a standard format for mail either.  What a wonderful
network they have :-).
-- 
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy                         
<---- ska: David le casse\*'      {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<----
<---- I'm not bad, I'm just coded that way!