elvy@harvard.ARPA (Marc Elvy) (08/13/84)
Hello,
There are many people now working on making a standardized version
of Steve Bellovin's pathalias software available for everyone on UNIX systems.
However, since that might take a little more time, I am sending out a program
called "pathto" which was written here and has proved somewhat useful. The
program polls a host which has pathalias running (default harvard.arpa) and
prints out paths from that host to the sites specified on the command line.
So, if you do not have pathalias running yet, or if you cannot find a path
to some site, try running "pathto <site>+" to obtain the arpanet and uucp
paths to that site. Note that, unfortunately, the current version gives you
a path from the HOST (i.e. harvard) rather than from your local machine, but
you can always send mail through harvard if you can find no other path. Here
is the current harvard uucp hop count:
#sites hops
2
261 !
1456 !!
940 !!!
547 !!!!
167 !!!!!
36 !!!!!!
8 !!!!!!!
5 !!!!!!!!
The path you are given is ordered (somewhat) by speed, but it is not guaranteed
to be the fastest route. However, it SHOULD be a reasonable and correct route.
Note that this program makes a TCP connection to Harvard, so you will have to
(1) be able to access harvard through a TCP connection and (2) add this line to
/etc/services:
path 541/tcp # path routing
If you have any questions, feel free to write to me. I also welcome any bug
reports, comments, and (especially) enhancements (e.g. the ability to return
a path from the local site rather than from the host).
Marc Elvy (elvy@harvard.{arpa,uucp})
P.S. I have included the manual page to /etc/rpath as well as to pathto,
since that is the program which runs on the host and does the actual
dirty work, and since command line options to rpath are important.
P.P.S. The source is in net.sources.
Marc A. Elvy ( elvy@harvard.{arpa,uucp} )
Aiken Computation Laboratory
Harvard University