henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (02/04/84)
A pox on "smart" mailers that assume they know the network better than
I do!!! When I send mail to ihnp4!floyd!utzoo!henry, I want it to go
by the path I specify. Ihnp4 has no @#&%*&^^*& business deciding to
delete "floyd" from the path! (I know it's not the fault of the people
at ihnp4, it's the $@%$#^%$^% Berkeley software they are running...)
I would suggest that in future, people who are writing mailers should
leave our old, simple, user-friendly exclamation points alone, and
concentrate on optimizing paths containing fun things like @'s. When
the customer (or some previous router) has specified the path he wants,
that's what he should get.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henrygjm@ihnp4.UUCP (Gary J. Murakami) (02/06/84)
I appreciate Henry's position, there are some cases in which explicit routing is needed, for instance, in queuing up a poll from other sites. There are better ways to do polling, like getting your friendly neighbor to set up a regular polling schedule. However, the news software produces extraordinarily long uucp addresses, sometimes taking a dozen hops where one is sufficient. This inefficiency costs real money and real time. One (poor) response could be to reject messages with addresses longer than 4 (arbitrary) hops. Instead paths are optimized so that we can continue to provide service at reasonable cost and with improved speed. Also, many AT&T-BL sites do rightmost neighbor optimization because they were forced to do so in order to reduce the load across systems in the netnews paths. There are several solutions to enable explicit routing. A) You could donate money to AT&T and other friendly companies so that we can buy more systems and pay larger phone bills to bounce the mail around from system to system. B) We could try to force each system to have a (pathalias) mail router, and then have news generate replies to host!user rather than to long-path!host!user. C) We can work on establishing domain addressing across the network, and then have news generate replies to user@host.domain. Note that RFC822 also has an explicit routing syntax for domain addresses. The current direction of the net seems to be in the direction of method (C). We would welcome help in accomplishing this development. Gary Murakami AT&T Bell Laboratories ihnp4!gjm
honey@down.UUCP (code 101) (02/06/84)
gary offers us some choices: give money to his rich employer (why gary? so you can drag home yet larger bags of bucks each week? you industry types make me want to puke!), make people use routers, or shove domains down our throats. personally, i like the second option, since that's what we do in my little domain (such as it is: up, down, yoyo, tilt, flakey, quirky, and princeton). last week i added "-psmart" to the arg list in recmail's call to delivermail, since news replies are exactly the sort of objects that should be auto-routed. (the in group here also does "smart" routing on mail replies and "simple" routing on mail sends, using ver. 2.17 Mail, back-hacked for delivermail.) since delivermail ignores unrecognized args, delivermail -psmart seems like a wise move for the standard version of recmail. of course, recmail has it's problems, e.g., it doesn't have an interface (not even one of those obnoxious user-friendly ones). perhaps Mail should be hacked up to accommodate the References header (as well as anything else the news-ites are planning to throw at us), or perhaps recmail should be made smarter. (in general, news could use some extra smarts in lots of places.) peter honeyman
piet@mcvax.UUCP (Piet Beertema) (02/07/84)
>When I send mail to ihnp4!floyd!utzoo!henry, I want it to go >by the path I specify. Ihnp4 has no @#&%*&^^*& business >deciding to delete "floyd" from the path! What the hell do you gain by leaving in the "floyd" hop????? -- Piet Beertema CWI (Center for Math. & Comp. Science), Amsterdam ...{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!piet
davecl@shark.UUCP (Dave Clemans) (02/09/84)
I can think of at least one reason: Say that you are on machine a. Machine a has uucp connections to machine b and machine c. Machine b also has a uucp connection to machine c. Say that for some reason you know that the link between machine a and machine c is down for about a week or two (dial-out modem problems or something) but the link between machine b and machine c is still up. Then you might want to use an address like "a!b!c" because that would get through faster even though the normal address of "a!c" would look shorter (in terms of hopcount) to the mailer on machine a. dgc
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (02/11/84)
Piet Beertema asks: >When I send mail to ihnp4!floyd!utzoo!henry, I want it to go >by the path I specify. Ihnp4 has no @#&%*&^^*& business >deciding to delete "floyd" from the path! What the hell do you gain by leaving in the "floyd" hop????? In this particular case, what I gain is that the mail goes through floyd. Which was precisely what I wanted. I wanted to find out whether floyd was still talking to us. If I'd just wanted to get the mail to myself (!) I'd simply have said "mail henry" instead of "mail ihnp4!floyd!utzoo!henry". -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry