john@x.UUCP (John Woods) (09/15/84)
For all of you who have been wondering (down!honey, Greg Skinner, et al), here is an announcement about the site "x": Name of site. x What the site is all about. This is the Charles River Data Systems development machine. See later for the origin of the name. Name of contact person at site. As for frog, John Woods, 617-626-1114. Electronic mail address of contact person. ...!decvax!frog!john ...!decvax!frog!x!john Systems with whom news articles are exchanged. (what kind of link, who the neighbor(s) are). frog The CRDS "quick-and-dirty net" (don't even ASK). Systems with whom mail is exchanged. (what kind of link, who the neighbor(s) are, what frequency of connection, whether or not you'll pass outside mail along). frog and the whole CRDS gang, constantly. x cannot be reached from the outside world directly, but getting to frog by UUCP is necessary and sufficient to reach anyone at CRDS. Willingness (or lack thereof) to connect to new sites that want to join usenet. If you run uucp, tell if new sites can call you, if you will poll them, what your policy is. frog will talk to anyone reasonably close. If you want to publish your uucp phone number, login, and password, include that info. Wouldn't help. Now, why is it called "x"? The following is a letter which I TRIED to send to down!honey, but ihpn4 seems awfully hard to reach. ---------------- Well, actually, my host is REALLY called "X", but I've already been advised to lowercasify it. While it may seem like a poor choice, here is the origin of the name: CRDS runs an internal "network" (RS-232 cables and a protocol which makes UUCP look like TCP/IP. However, the code is *quite* elegant!), and has for about 2 years. (NOTE: Real ETHERNET has recently been implemented, but we have all of two boards, which the network group has) The names of the first few machines were Q, X, C, and V (which were easy to type). C and V eventually became crypt and vulture, but X remained X. Then, early this year, we finally got UUCP ported to our operating system (UNOS, not UNIX). The machine which actually runs UUCP is named "frog" (after the CRDS mascot), and due to our mail system, my mail address was "frog!john". Hence, no one was the wiser about our curious internal names. Then, I decided to drag over NETNEWS. The netnews system runs over our own network internally, and is gateway'ed in and out through frog. Fine. Unfortunately, this now means that people can see the "x" host name in our submissions. While it may be an unfortunate name for a huge network like UUCP, our system administrator would rather not change it, and I would rather not have to en-gross-ify netnews to lie. Does it cause real problems? If so, I will try to do something about it, but if it is merely a curiosity or in bad taste, I'd rather let it lie. -- John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (617) 626-1114 ...!decvax!frog!john, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw%mit-ccc@MIT-XX.ARPA I have absolutely nothing clever to say in this signature.