Bakin@HI-MULTICS.ARPA (Jerry Bakin) (02/18/84)
Am I alone, or have other people experienced:
o Mail lost in UUCP.
o Mail successfully transmitted but received too late to be of use.
(One week or more delay interval between sending and receiving)
o A from path which is useless (no pun intended) as a reply path, and
no reply path explicitly given.
o No idea of a path from host A to host 2, much less knowledge of an
optimal route between the two.
o A previously known host in a path between two hosts going down for an
unknown amount of time forcing a completely new path to be worked out.
o A previously known gateway between two networks going down for an
unknown amount of time forcing completely new paths to be figured out.
o The name of a host in a path changing.
It is my understanding UUCP was intended to be used on the very low
scale. Now, what is already an overloaded net is threatened to be
completely inundated by the release (neither good nor bad) of a version
of UUCP for the PC. Am I to believe that industry, faced with KNOWLEDGE
of the above problems, and needing a mail which is reliable, is
screaming for Lauren to release his PC UUCP?
Yes, I do believe they are screaming, but for two reasons: I) They have
no knowledge of the problems, II) Cheap is CHEAP.
However, with the possible trebling of the load on the UUCP net due to
commercial use, can we expect intolerable problems? Perhaps such sites
as Berkeley, a taxpayer funded gateway, will stop being a gateway,
because there is only so much subsizing of a commercial net their
administration will allow (not to mention the possible trebling costs)?
Or, other gateway sites which are already commercial, but support CS
use, will stop being allowed to be used as gates due to increased costs
and loads on their systems.
Lauren, we all want to become rich and help mankind, let me make a
suggestion that you design a net which runs on phone lines at 1200 baud,
is domain like in its addresses, dynamically rerouting based upon cost,
and speed, delivers mail, registered mail, and secure mail, (all with
acknowledgement of receipt available.) Start it for the PC, (call it
Personnel Computer Protocal -- PCP), design it so anyone can adopt it,
and market this. Businesses will pay the added phone costs in much the
same way that they pay for business calls now, so the cost of calling
cross country via cross town will not be as important as getting the
mail there this hour versus this month. In the mean time, UUCP will not
become anymore bogged down than it is, nor will I or any of us have to
subsidize Charlie Chaplan's Hat Business anymore than we currently do.
And if you really want to become rich, you'll lease own cross country
lines, (They're only 3K a month) and run your net yourself at higher
speeds and charging people by the message.
Jerry.davidk@dartvax.UUCP (David C. Kovar) (02/18/84)
You suggest that Lauren go off and start up his own PCP network
so that UUCP will not become anymore bogged down than it is. You also
state that most of your problems with UUCP involve hosts going down,
causing you to reroute via other sites or networks. No where do you
mention that the problems with UUCP involve overuse. Now I agree that
UUCP handles one hell of a lot of traffic, and I also agree that adding
PC sites will add more of a load to the net, but I fail to agree that
switching the PC's to another net will solve the problem.
First off, I am going to send news and mail even if I do not
have UUCP running on my IBM XT. With it, I can compose on my own system
and free ports up on the colleges system. Without it, I will be composing
and thinking on the college's VAX and tying up their resources. Either
way, that article/mail is going out on the net. So in this case, I see
a PLUS in releasing UUCP for the PC, not a minus. The net load stays
about the same and my host system gets me off on my own.
Secondly, the only people who can tie into an existing nodes
will have to request permission to do so from that site. Same process
that you have to go through for an account. This means that every PC
owner and their brother will not go out an join the net, they can't
get at it. They will all be paying for their own phone calls, not
the rest of the network. (I already ventured that their postings
to the net would stay the same, keeping that cost to the net even.)
Now each site might not want 40 PC UUCP sites calling in, but they
can deal with that on their own, that will not affect the net as a
whole.
But, we will have a large number of new site names, and that
must be dealt with. And I also would not want to route my mail/news
through a PC site. To this end, we might add a 'pc' to the site name,
indicating that it was a leaf and should not be included in internal
paths. This would also help keep the site names unique.
I wrap this up with one question: Who owns the net? If you
do not want to subsidize IBM, do not permit PC UUCP's at your site.
Each particular 'you' out there can refuse to subsidize in this way
but I would be rather upset if you decided to prevent me from posting
just because I own a IBM and you get paid $30K a year to hack UNIX.
If worst comes to worst, I'll go buy PC/IX and then be a 'real' site.
And by damned, if you do not like that, I can probably manage to
trade my car in on a MicroVax. If you want to keep VAX sites off of
the net, I wish you luck.
Sorry about the flame, all.
--
David C. Kovar
Usenet: {linus | decvax | cornell}!dartvax!davidk
ARPA: kovar@MIT-ML (Infrequent)
U.S. Snail HB 3140
Dartmouth College
Hanover NH
03755
"The difficult we did yesterday, the impossible we are doing now."