sl@van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) (11/12/89)
In article <89Nov8.024650est.2780@neat.cs.toronto.edu> rayan@cs.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen) writes: >fronting for them. There are at least a dozen links between random Canadian >sites and random U.S. sites. The lack of a general .CA forwarder is on >purpose, due to traffic flow considerations, because the information What Rayan doesn't explicitly say is that connectivity of .ca type sites is very poor right now. Much better links north/south than east/west. It's normal to receive mail in vancouver from toronto that's come via uunet! Currently there are a few internet links. One from ubc-cs to uw-beaver. Another back east in Toronto. So it's fairly inexpensive to exchange mail and news north/south. But expensive (read X.25 or long distance) between here and the rest of Canada. Sometime in the near future there is supposed to be a TCP/IP backbone from Vancouver to Calgary to Toronto. Which will make connectivity up here a lot better. But until then lots of stuff goes south and then across the continent before coming north again. -- Stuart.Lynne@wimsey.bc.ca ubc-cs!van-bc!sl 604-937-7532(voice) 604-939-4768(fax)
cfe+@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart) (11/16/89)
Maybe there is no top-level forwarder for all of *.ca, and maybe the reason is that whoever established the links didn't want you to think, even for a minute, that you could get mail to user@garbagename.ca . Craig Everhart
lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy) (11/16/89)
cfe+@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart) writes: >Maybe there is no top-level forwarder for all of *.ca, and maybe the >reason is that whoever established the links didn't want you to think, >even for a minute, that you could get mail to user@garbagename.ca . Exactly. All .Ca sites get appropriate UUCP reachability data updated monthly in the maps. Having a central .Ca forwarder for UUCP would not be such a hot idea because a) there are parts of the country which are completely isolated from each other except for links through the US, and b) The .Ca forwarder would be using the exact same data that is currently available to all and often route back through the US, simply adding extra hops to the route. Just one more argument to keep you maps up-to-date (or to forward to a local UUCP site that does or a nearby Internet host). Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4