lauren@vortex.UUCP (07/20/83)
There is no real "mystery" about the situation regarding ARPANET.
The only persons who may directly make use of ARPANET facilities
are those engaged in work for organizations who have contracts
related to DoD or other U.S. government-sponsored/related work that
involves the ARPANET or requires access to ARPANET-connected
facilities.
All mail gatewaying between ARPA and Usenet/UUCP is currently
on an "unofficial" basis. The fact that mail gatewaying exists
does not imply any more general access. To make use of
FTP facilities, you must be logged onto a host that itself
is directly on ARPANET. There are no magic FTP gateways to Usenet
or to UUCP in general. There are two ways to get files
that are available for "public" FTP'ing from ARPA:
1) If an ARPA site that also runs UUCP wanted to keep some of those
files locally for the convenience of UUCP users, that would
be their decision.
2) Even if (1) was not practical, there are some ARPANET people who
would probably be willing to send off some files on a request
basis as long as the requests didn't start getting too frequent.
However, those are currently the only alternatives that exist.
As for mail, I see mail gatewayed through Berkeley all the time.
If an ARPA mailing list maintainer wishes to do so, he/she could
add individual UUCP recipients to any list via Berkeley.
However, Berkeley can only handle a "reasonable" amount of
traffic, and as I mentioned earlier, all such traffic is "unofficial".
In general, if you wish to send mail to an ARPANET destination,
you should use the address form:
... !ucbvax!NAME@SITE
You should ALWAYS include your EXACT return address in such messages;
don't assume that the ARPA person will be able to figure out your
address. Your return address will be of the form:
[UUCP pathname relative to ucbvax]@BERKELEY
where "[UUCP pathname relative to ucbvax]" would be:
baringa!klattu
to reach user "klattu" at site "baringa" (assuming that ucbvax's
UUCP spoke directly to that of "baringa".)
If there are any questions on these issues, please contact
me directly. Thanks.
--Lauren--
{decvax, ihnp4, harpo, ucbvax!lbl-csam, randvax}!vortex!laurenmark@cbosgd.UUCP (07/22/83)
I wish Lauren hadn't posted this information, but now it's too late. The problem is that, now that the method has been widely published, the volume of traffic through ucbvax will increase dramatically. If the volume gets too high, Berkeley will shut off the gateway. (They shut it down once before for exactly this reason - their machines couldn't handle the high load.) Please remember that this service, provided by Berkeley, is out of Berkeley's generousity. It is NOT something they are being paid or encouraged to do. If anything, ARPA is discouraging them. Please DO NOT send mail through Berkeley to the ARPANET frivolously. If you have work that must be done or another good reason why your message is important, fine. But don't shoot the breeze through the gateway. And try to avoid sending mail about non-work related topics, such as rogue, wine tasting, or science fiction. And especially, please do not send large numbers of messages or long messages - they make the problem much worse. (When I looked this morning, the load average on ucbvax, a 750, was 22. It timed out while I tried to log in. Nobody lives on this machine, it's there strictly as a gateway. They certainly don't need any more traffic.) CSNET will soon be providing an "official" gateway (or, more accurately, a mail service between the ARPANET and their Phonenet sites). Anyone in the USA can join CSNET, but it costs big money ($30,000/year, I think). I understand deals can be worked out with educational institutions and impoverished sites to get substantial discounts. Don't contact me to get onto CSNET - I am not on it. I think one can contact Mike O'Brien at Rand, Larry Landweber or Marvin Solomon at Wisconsin, Dave Farber at Delaware, or Peter Denning at Purdue. (I'm unsure about this.) Mark Horton