chris@politik.UUCP (Christopher Seiwald) (12/11/84)
THE QUESTION I sent out an inquiry over a month ago asking the question "Is there a right way to use map data?" for mail routing. That is, how do you transform the usenet connectivity information distributed in mod.map.news and mod.map.uucp into a system whereby your machine routes mail addressed to "joe@site.uucp" properly. The problem breaks into two components: 1) How do you produce routing information from connectivity information in the mod.map data? 2) How do you get your mailer to use this routing information? I should add that we are a uucp only 4.2BSD site running sendmail, without a source license. POSSIBLE HELP FROM NETLAND Answers were posted to the net and mailed to me. The general answer is "not really." Specific help is available though: generating path data: (PATHALIAS) Peter Honeyman (down!honey) has pathalias, a hummdinger of a program which takes connectivity information and produces a path database. Its output is either a dbm pair of files or an ascii file with lines of the format "xvax avax!bvax!xvax!%s". Unfortunately, its input is *not* mod.map.news (maybe mod.map.uucp?). A filter helps. routing mail: (sendmail) Bruce Israel (umcp-cs!israel) suggests rewriting sendmail a bit to handle routing as another from address rewriting, using a path table. He has done this. He has not distributed it. (mailer) Ray Essick (uiucdcsb!essick) shuns rewriting sendmail, favoring a special routing mailer which takes the destination host and supplies a path to the actual mailer, uux. This seems like a good idea. He did not post his mailer, but will if asked. (mailer) Mark Horton (cbosgd!mark) of the UUCP project also has a routing mailer, called uudom - it understands domains. He mentions modifying sendmail. (mailer) Robert Elz (mulga!kre) also has a routing mailer. He doesn't use it yet, for lack of good map data. all: (MKCON) Piet Beertema (mcvax!piet) has a complete system which unbundles the news map files, makes the path table and does the rerouting. Unfortunately, it was a little too complicated for me to use, since implementation included installing many files, seriously editing sendmail.cf, and running programs with much site specific information compiled in. RECOMMENDED SOLUTION o Run mod.map.news or mod.map.uucp through pathalias to produce the routing database. Since the new mod.map.uucp data is not out yet, I don't know if pathalias will swallow it whole. For sure, you can take the (minimal) connectivity information in mod.map.news and pass it through a filter. o Install a routing mailer. Modify sendmail.cf to use this mailer as your uucp mailer. I am posting a package to net.sources to help you do all this. It includes - a simple awk.script to filter mod.map.news for pathalias. - a routing mailer. - a sendmail.cf question and answer sheet. - a makefile to automate building the routing database. The routing mailer (uuxmail) is a short csh script which takes the host and user arguments provided by sendmail, looks up host in the routing database to produce a path, tacks the user name onto that path, and then hands the result to uux for mailing. It isn't fancy but it was easy. If you need pathalias also, I can send you a copy. -- Christopher Seiwald dual!ptsfa!politik!chris