mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (01/21/86)
We're running into a problem with a BITNET/UUCP gateway. It seems that many people on BITNET have only upper case terminals, and send mail to addresses like USER@HOST.UUCP. It's fair to turn HOST.UUCP into host.uucp for UUCP, but what about the USER part? The ARPA convention is that the case on USER is supposed to be left alone. This was done because Multics used to be case sensitive (although I understand it no longer is.) 4.2BSD is also case insensitive, so mail to host!host!USER is the same as mail to host!host!user. But I don't think System V is. This leaves a person with an upper case BITNET terminal, who wants to send mail to a System V user, no way to get the mail through. Unless the gateway does some magic and turns USER@HOST.UUCP into host!host!user. Are there any systems out there on the UUCP side of the gateway that would break if this change were to be made? Any upper case only names? Any mixed names? Any upper case only mailing lists? The proposed change is somewhat of a hack, but it just might be the only way to make the gateway work properly. Mark
dat@hpcnof.UUCP (01/22/86)
> We're running into a problem with a BITNET/UUCP gateway. > It seems that many people on BITNET have only upper case > terminals, and send mail to addresses like USER@HOST.UUCP. > It's fair to turn HOST.UUCP into host.uucp for UUCP, but > what about the USER part? No it's not fair to translate <HOST>.UUCP to <host>.uucp!! There is no constraint against machines that have uppercase letters in them to distinguish them from lowercase letters and this mapping of case would destroy that. Besides, how would you ever send mail to "Shasta" (not "shasta")?? Also mapping usernames to lowercase is also wrong. My suspicion is that if a terminal cannot generate other than lowercase you better use some other system to send mail... (talk about primitive!!) -- Dave Taylor [hplabs, ihnp4] !hpfcla!d_taylor
reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (01/22/86)
I've used upper-case names in uucp for years, just to be pathological and cause trouble. I recently converted "Glacier" to "glacier" when it became a backbone site, out of a sense of civic duty. >This leaves a person with an upper case BITNET terminal, who >wants to send mail to a System V user, no way to get the >mail through. Unless the gateway does some magic and turns >USER@HOST.UUCP into host!host!user. The problem with your solution is that it aids and abets the receipt of all-uppercase mail by helpless System V users. My attitude towards this kind of thing is that you should do nothing at all to help people with such radically inferior hardware; maybe the pressure to be able to send mail will motivate them to upgrade to 1970's technology. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA
mikel@codas.ATT.UUCP (Mikel Manitius) (01/26/86)
> We're running into a problem with a BITNET/UUCP gateway. > It seems that many people on BITNET have only upper case > terminals, and send mail to addresses like USER@HOST.UUCP. > It's fair to turn HOST.UUCP into host.uucp for UUCP, but > what about the USER part? Well, it he's on a Unix system, and really wants to kludge it, he could do: mail `echo "USER@HOST.UUCP" | dd conv=lcase` or mail `echo "USER@HOST" | dd conv=lcase`.UUCP Sigh. -- Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL ...{ihnp4|akgua|bellcore|clyde|koura}!codas!mikel
laura@hoptoad.uucp (Laura Creighton) (01/28/86)
The people on BITNET with the upper case only terminals have a worse problem than not being able to send mail to System V people. They have upper case only terminals! I think that the best solution all around would be for them to buy better terminals. If that is not possible, then somewhere in BITNET land there needs to be a convention for ``Begin lower case now''. All of our uucp logins are mixed case right now; they all begin with an upper-case U, e.g. Usun Ulll-crg Uihnp4 and Ucbosgd. While it seems unlikely that anyone would want to send mail to any of these accounts, the fact that we have a use for mixed case account names implies that somebody else might have one as well, and I don't think that we should have another kludgy limitation to accommodate the BITNET people. -- Laura Creighton sun!hoptoad!laura (note new address! l5 will still ihnp4!hoptoad!laura work for a while....) hoptoad!laura@lll-crg.arpa
jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) (01/28/86)
> We're running into a problem with a BITNET/UUCP gateway. > It seems that many people on BITNET have only upper case > terminals, and send mail to addresses like USER@HOST.UUCP. > It's fair to turn HOST.UUCP into host.uucp for UUCP, but > what about the USER part? Well, I responded by mail to Mark on this question, but unfortunately ihnp4 can't contact cbosgd (!) at present, so the message got returned... ----- Original Message Follows ----- Hello, Mark... I have a suggestion for an algorithm. System V's "getty" uses the following algorithm when getting the user name: "The user's name is scanned to see if it contains any lower-case alphabetic characters; if not, and if the name is non-empty, the system is told to map any future upper-case characters on input into the corresponding lower-case characters by setting IUCLC in c_iflag, and to map any lower case characters on output to escaped uppercase characters by setting OLCUC in c_oflag." Therefore, if a user name typed in to getty contains all uppercase letters, getty assumes that the user has an all-uppercase terminal. I think probably you could do the same: if there are any lowercase characters at all, leave the name untouched, but if they're all uppercase, convert to lowercase. The reason is that it would be impossible under System V for a user with a name that was all uppercase to log in, as far as I can determine. It is, however, possible that some mailers allow all-uppercase user names and are case sensitive, but that's a problem of the mailer, I think. The tty driver (which performs the above translations) lets you escape uppercase characters on an all-uppercase terminal by writing a backslash in front of it; thus, for example, when "login" prompts for a password, it prints "\PASSWORD: " due to the P being capitalized. You could use such a scheme to allow uppercase letters to be left alone when doing the translation to lowercase, although I am not sure at the moment how compatible that would be with other standards for writing names in mail addresses. -- UUCP: Ofc: jer@peora.UUCP Home: jer@jerpc.CCC.UUCP CCC DNS: peora, pesnta US Mail: MS 795; CONCURRENT Computer Corp. SDC; (A Perkin-Elmer Company) 2486 Sand Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32809-7642 LOTD(3)=m "I didn't watch the Super Bowl."