ksh@cbosgd.UUCP (Karen Summers-Horton) (06/01/84)
The following is a progress report to the UUCP community on the status of the UUCP Project funded by the Usenix Association. So we may keep you informed of the progress of the project, I will be posting monthly progress reports to Usenet. Summary of Goals of the Project: The UUCP project has grown tired of trying to get mail from one place to another by the seat of its pants, and has decided to do something about it. We have created three coordinated efforts. The map group is collecting data to form a UUCP map. Once collected, it will keep the map up to date enough to be used by mail routing software. The mail group will write a set of programs to run under Unix to take care of mail routing. The news group, which is not working under any timetable or deadlines, will continue the maintenence of the netnews software. The results of these efforts will be made available to the UUCP community for free. It is hoped that after the software and map are completed and distributed, a large part of the UUCP community will make use of it, and that standard distributions of UNIX will include it or software compatible with it. We have chosen the ARPA domain structure as a mailing address standard, since this appears to be an emerging de-facto standard. Use of domains will ensure a flexible system for future expansion, and will ensure that we are compatible with neighboring electronic mail communities that use the same standards, such as the ARPA Internet, CSNET, and Digital's ENET. Mapping progress: 'Phase One' of the data collection is complete. That is, we have completed the first round of data collection, and are ready to begin the maintenance phase. We also plan to begin more serious attempts at collecting data on systems that have not yet responded. The data collection effort was conducted mainly by Scott Bradner and Rob Kolstad, with the assistance of others at Harvard. This help is greatly appreciated. At this point we have divided the UUCP world into nine regions for continued data collection and map maintenance. The individuals who have agreed to help in this tremendous effort are: Rick Adams (seismo!rick) Greg Fowler (hplabs!fowler) Rick Kiessig (idi!kiessig) Doug McCallum (nbires!mccallum) Lauren Weinstein (vortex!lauren) Gary Murakami (ihnp4!gjm) Teus Hagen (mcvax!teus) Bill Welch (jett!bill) Their specific areas of responsibility will be posted in the near future, so you will know who is your regional coordinator for the project. Software progress: The software group is being coordinated by Berry Kercheval (zinfandel!berry). The user interface will present ARPA domains to the user in the user@domain syntax. All headers will be in this syntax and the user will normally type addresses in this format. For upward compatibility, we will also accept the host!user syntax. At the transport level, we have settled on a modified domain syntax: domain!user. This will enable us to use the existing UUCP network routing mechanism without worrying about what an existing host will do with an address like a!b@c.d. Instead, we will generate a!c.d!b which is safe. The current set of functions to be provided include the "simplemail" program, which acts like sendmail but is much simpler and only handles the ordinary cases; the rmail program to handle incoming UUCP mail, a front end for /bin/mail to determine if it is invoked as a user interface or a mailer and to call either the real /bin/mail or simplemail; back ends to do mail delivery (/bin/mail, uux), and minor modifications to the popular user interfaces (Mail and MH) to handle domains properly, for example in replies. We currently have a prototype program that will accept mail based on the domain syntax and pass it up and down the domain tree and deliver it locally. This was written by Paul Bame. We intend to extend this program to handle additional cases, such as the old ! syntax and the new domain!user transport syntax. Other Issues: The Usenix Conference in Salt Lake City will be the forum for many detailed progress reports on the project, and several announcements of new portions of the project. I will summarize these reports and announcements to the net after the conference. The UUCP Mapping Project will have its own session at the conference, Friday, June 15, 9-10:30 a.m. (track B). As always, I welcome all comments and suggestions concerning this project. Mail them to cbosgd!ksh. Thank you. Karen Summers-Horton cbosgd!ksh
ksh@cbosgd.UUCP (Karen Summers-Horton) (08/14/84)
This is the progress report for the Usenix UUCP Project for the month of July, 1984. I realize that these progress reports are normally posted on the first of the month, but due to an extraordinary amount of work at the beginning of the month, I was delayed. The big progress to report is the posting of the UUCP map to Usenet. The posting began, a little late, on August 4, 1984 and is still continuing. We've run into several problems with the posting, but the entire thing WILL be posted, so we are stressing patience in Usenet readers. We are also attempting to obtain the most recent version of pathalias, and will post that after the maps. Since nothing of this magnitude, involving 8 separate people posting, has ever been posted to Usenet, problems were bound to arise. But thanks to several quick-thinking people involved in the project, things are still going amazingly smoothly. With regards to the mail software portion of the project, Paul Bame did some last minute work on his mailer, then sent it to Berry for distribution. Berry had some trouble getting it out, but we finally got it out to everybody around the end of the month. And the news software portion began final beta testing of 2.10.2. It's ready to go, we're just waiting for the UUCP map to die down to post it so we won't flood the net which is already carrying more traffic than usual. And with respect to the UUCP Sitename Registry run by Lauren Weinstein, a committee has been formed to determine policy on name rejections. We are currently debating about the scope of the committee and what the legal implications of any policy we choose might be. As always, we welcome comments and suggestions. Karen Summers-Horton
ksh@cbosgd.UUCP (Karen Summers-Horton) (10/01/84)
This is the progress report, detailing progress made in September by the Usenix UUCP Project. Progress is continuing on the mail software, and we still expect to have the software in beta test, sometime in October. We're beginning to make revisions to the UUCP data, taking into consideration the many requests and comments from the UUCP community. A few of the changes we expect to make before the data is made public again are: - division of the data by state/province/country. - posting will be done from a central location in the future. - we're trying to set up a 'network' of machines around the country that will keep current copies of the map available until we get the subdomain structure in place. - we're also making many internal changes to the data to make editing and maintenance easier. Rick Adams posted news version 2.10.2 to Usenet earlier this month. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. Thanks. Karen Summers-Horton
ksh@cbosgd.UUCP (Karen Summers-Horton) (12/10/84)
This is the progress report for the UUCP Project funded by the Usenix Association. This progress report covers the past two months. Progress on the map portion of the project has been significant. We have changed the format of the map slightly, to make it more readable, and easier for the map maintenance people to edit. The new format looks like this: #N name of site #S system type #O organization #C contact person #E contact person's electronic address #T contact person's telephone number #P organization's address #L longitude and latitude #R remarks #W who edited the entry and when # sitename connection(FREQUENCY), connection(FREQUENCY), connection(FREQUENCY) In addition, the portion of the UUCP map that covers Canada, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, North Dakota, and South Dakota was posted to Usenet around the middle of November. The entire UUCP map will be posted to Usenet again, the first week of January. Shortly after that, we will announce a system of 10 machines around the country, that the UUCP public may get portions of the UUCP map from at their convenience. This is still in the testing stage, and the details will not be made public until after the complete posting of the map in January, to avoid having these volunteer sites swamped. Progress on the mail software has been slow - we've lost our supervisor for that portion of the project and are spending significant amounts of time discussing issues such as how to deal with ambiguous addresses like a!b@c. Work has been progressing on the self contained mailer program. A back end called uudom which could serve as a back end for sendmail and handle routing in a subdomain environment has also been written. A volunteer has been working on extending it to make a decision about which host to route to. Work has proceeded on a document outlining the requirements and procedure to be a subdomain of UUCP. This document is still undergoing internal review before it is posted for comments from the public. We've received the new RFC from the Arpanet, and the date for applying to become a top-level domain has been pushed back to January, 1985. All initial inquiries have been made, and when January rolls around we are ready to begin the formal process. Several members of the project are also preparing to give progress reports on various aspects of the project at the Usenix Conference in Dallas in January. Our session is scheduled for Friday, January 25, 9-10 a.m. As usual, we welcome all comments and suggestions on the project. Karen Summers-Horton cbosgd!ksh