dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer) (10/04/83)
An earlier posting of this news item seems to have gotten lost... My local news feed sysmgr sent me this note: "I had forgotten that bbncca was id'ing itself [within Netnews] as .ARPA. It might be better to have bbncca be .UUCP. Some of the mailers (including mine) will try to send a reply via the ARPA net & choke because of no arpanet connection & throw the reply away." Actually, I don't have INTERNET defined, so I'm not generating or using internet syntax within UUCP mail. Nevertheless, prompted by this, I have the following questions. I'm not a mail guru by any means, and perhaps these might have been discussed at length earlier. 1.) What is the function of internet-style addressing within UUCP mail systems? I can only guess that some sites have abstracted the USENET map into a database, and resolve internet site names to physical paths. Being new to the UUCP net as a site administrator, I'm not aware of such programs. 2.) What SHOULD a UUCP site do with an address containing the domain ".ARPA" when responding to mail? 3.) Given that the only domain approved (so far) by the DoD NIC is ".ARPA", what am I to make of an address locally like "user@site.UUCP"? Will ".UUCP" be given official status? Any definitive answers to this very murky subject are most welcome. Regards, Steve Dyer decvax!genrad!wjh12!bbncca!sdyer sdyer@bbncca
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (10/04/83)
This subject has come up before. It's a murky area because of the following problem: What does a gateway call itself? Consider the following example: Host uw-beaver is on both the ARPANET and UUCP. It is legally known as both uw-beaver.ARPA and uw-beaver.UUCP. So what name does it use when generating its host address, as when it creates an outgoing mail header? a) uw-beaver.ARPA; a reply on the ARPANET will work fine. But a reply on UUCP to uw-beaver.ARPA will be routed to the ARPANET gateway and over the ARPANET to uw-beaver. There are political problems here - someone on UUCP has "made use of the ARPANET", and uw-beaver has caused this to happen. uw-beaver is going to be afraid to let this happen. b) uw-beaver.UUCP; this works fine on UUCP, but replies from the ARPANET will go to a UUCP gateway, and then over the much slower, less reliable, and more expensive (phone charges) UUCP net. Not good. c) uw-beaver.ARPA or uw-beaver.UUCP, depending on where the message is going; in general, you don't know where it's going - in Usenet, it may be going both places. Ditto for a mailing list - if the mailing list is on another machine, you have no idea who in what domain will get it. Also, you may be on another host at uw on the same LAN as uw-beaver, and not have enough information to fill in the blank. Finally, consider published addresses, such as business cards. d) uw-beaver, letting each domain fill in their own name; (this is in fact what they are doing now). The problems with this are obvious - it only works as long as the host is in every domain in the world, which won't last very long. The reply from the powers that be on the ARPANET basically said that in the long run, such sites probably should call themselves things like uw-beaver.UUCP because on the ARPANET, a nameserver will realize that this is the same as uw-beaver.ARPA and send it over the ARPANET. It is unclear whether they will eventually allow a .UUCP top level domain. There is a set of requirements that will have to be met, including a responsible person keeping a master list and a nameserver on the Internet that has an up-to-date list of sites and how to get to each. There is hope for this but nothing firm yet. Another possibility (one I don't like) is to make UUCP a non-top level domain, e.g. .UUCP.ARPA or .UUCP.Berkeley.ARPA. Another possibility the powers have suggested (and I am opposed to) is to make Usenet a top level domain. In any case, for Usenet purposes, if you're running 2.10 news you are generating a From line in Internet syntax, whether you define INTERNET locally or not. INTERNET defines whether your mailers understand Internet syntax, and controls how your reply command works. It does not control how your news goes out. In theory, either .ARPA or .UUCP should work, subject to the above weirdness. Any mailer that claims to understand Internet syntax should understand either .UUCP or .ARPA, although since .UUCP is not officially sanctioned most sites on the ARPANET do not currently understand .UUCP. But we have to call ourselves something. Mark Horton
dee@cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) (10/15/83)
For machines which are on multiple nets, how about allowing a list
of domains, like uw-beaver.{ARPA UUCP}?
+ Donald E. Eastlake, III
ARPA: dee@CCA-UNIX usenet: {decvax,linus}!cca!dee