clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (02/23/90)
In article <1990Feb20.215720.14263@eci386.uucp> woods@eci386.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) writes: > In article <90Feb14.234629est.6765@neat.cs.toronto.edu> rayan@cs.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen) writes: > > uucpadm@becker.UUCP (Uucp Administration) writes: > > >So, if the first 3 aren't in the "paths" file, smail > > >will come to the "utoronto.ca" entry and gleefully > > >constructs this path: > > Sounds good to me. However, why would the 3rd line not be in the paths > > file? That's your bug. > > >basically I'm looking for a good solution. > > Keep the .utoronto.ca entry. It should cause routes like > I'm going to just shoot from the keyboard, because I don't really want > to try fixing the problem just now, so I may be way off base..... You are - you must have a short memory ;-). > The last time I looked at this problem, I was having trouble sending > to telly.on.ca, the path was ending in yorkvm1.bitnet!evan. > After a bit of digging, including conversations with Rayan, I found > that smail wasn't picking the logical path from the database, but on > further digging it appears that the database isn't always complete. > However, when I look at the maps, everything seems A-OK, including > identical data for both sites with complete database entries, and > incomplete ones. I suspect there is a bug in pathalias, and that > smail2.5 is indeed correct. Totally wrong. pathalias is OK. Smail is a bit stupid but more or less okay w.r.t. the RFC's. The stupidity would *still* not have caused a problem in the yorkvm1.bitnet!evan situation, except for a silly (embarrasing) botch on my part... Our map unpacker was not at fault either. You've obviously forgotten the reason... I'm sure that Rayan and Evan still do remember. The reason was... I had manually marked "telly" dead in the map entry that we keep to customize our routing. This entry is not in the normal maps directory, so you didn't see it when you looked for reasons why this occured. Effectively smail was told that there was *no* available UUCP routing and therefore had to get to the .on.ca domain first. As soon as I removed the "dead {telly}" from our private customization file, things started working perfectly - Greg take a look at the "telly.on.ca" entries in our paths file now. utoronto.ca works here fine. PS: I have a secure map unpacker that is capable of keeping the maps compressed and takes as little CPU/memory as possible. This was posted to comp.sources.misc a couple of months ago. Henry expressed some interest in including an improved version (which doesn't require changing pathalias) with C-news, and I sent it to him. It may appear in one of the upcoming C-news patches. I'll probably also send it to comp.soures.misc. -- Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list