edelheit@MITRE.ARPA (Jeff Edelheit) (05/21/85)
Thanks to Chuck , I got an explanation of the usenet mail paths. As several folks sent me msgs. syaing that they were as confused as me, I have included Chuck's msg. The only remaining question is, if more than one path is listed, and you don't know who sends mail to whom and when, which path should you chose? I guess us Mil/Arpanet users are really spoiled. ------- Forwarded Message To: hplabs!ucbvax!edelheit@MITRE.ARPA Subject: Re: Usenet Mail Addresses In-reply-to: your article <10790@brl-tgr.ARPA> Jeff, the "{"'s usually symbolize an OR construction, especially if the sites are separated by vertical bars (|). So yes {hplabs|dual|qantel} would mean any one of those sites. As for which path is best, I prefer to use the least number of hops algorithim unless I know a site is slow or overloaded in which case I can sacrifice a few hops to go around it. And as some systems get mail in the morning and send it out at night one "hop" can represent one day of travel time. So things are slow. On the arpa side if you see somone with a path that includes ucbvax then you can use that to mail to them. For instance my path descriptor is {ihnp4,fortune}!dual\ {qantel,idi}-> !intelca!cem {ucbvax,hao}!hplabs/ which has ucbvax in the bottom line. To construct a path out of this you notice that either ucbvax OR hao can go through hplabs to intelca so the path becomes "hplabs!intelca!cem" which is everything except the ucbvax part, and the arpa address is then "hplabs!intelca!cem"@Berkeley because Berkeley is the same as ucbvax on the usenet side. I have heard that brl-bmd will also gateway messages in this way to the usenet side. Is this clear now? - --Chuck ------- End of Forwarded Message Jeff Edelheit (edelheit@mitre)