Xref: utzoo comp.mail.uucp:1972 news.sysadmin:1004 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!epiwrl!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,news.sysadmin Subject: Re: Be cautious about declaring yourself a gateway if on Internet Message-ID: <2499@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 26 Sep 88 20:15:57 GMT References: <2488@epimass.EPI.COM> <29499@oliveb.olivetti.com> <697@mailrus.cc.umich.edu> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Distribution: na Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 29 In article <697@mailrus.cc.umich.edu> emv@mailrus.cc.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) writes: >pathalias data is the wrong source of information for .edu domain >hosts; the name servers are much more useful and reliable. >filter out all of the .foo.edu information from your pathalias >run and just make sure that the .edu gateway you declare is running >a sendmail with MX records. Correction: pathalias data is the wrong source of information for .edu, .com, .mil, etc, domains IF the domain is connected to the Internet or to CSNET, unless the gateway is also very well connected to major sites on the UUCP network (as Sun is, for example). Otherwise (for domains that are connected to the outside world only by UUCP) it is frequently more efficient to use pathalias data, since such data will show all connections. You don't necessarily know that a particular domain is UUCP-only or not. There has been some controversy lately about whether to show domain information for non-UUCP Zone members in the d.* files. There's a good reason not to; it generates WORSE mail paths in many cases if it's not done correctly. But don't go blindly removing all second level domain paths from your pathalias output (for example, don't remove .epi.com!). Mail will still get through, but everything will pass through the top-level domain gateways whether it needs to or not, increasing the load on sites that are already extremely busy. -- - Joe Buck, card-carrying ACLU liberal jbuck@epimass.epi.com, or uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck, or jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net for old Arpa sites