pleasant@rutgers.EDU (Mel Pleasant) (07/30/87)
This is a *MUST READ* announcement for all site administrators
maintaining map entries published in the comp.mail.maps newsgroup. Please
read the entire message carefully before attempting to modify your entry.
In an attempt to comply with RFC822, RFC976 and other mail
standards documents, The UUCP Mapping Project will no longer publish map
entries that contain certain types of constructs. Since most of these
constructs have not been accepted in new map entries for quite some time,
most of you will not be affected by this announcement. Sites that
currently have these constructs were allowed to keep them through
grandfather clauses that can no longer be invoked. One currently accepted
construct, involving the use of pathalias network characters, will
unfortunately no longer be accepted. So, with your current map entry at
your side, I urge you to read the entire announcement, make corrections as
appropriate, any send in your update. Since I'll be on vacation until the
end of August, questions will be fielded by Mark Horton (stargate!mark).
o - site and domain names may contain the following characters: a
through z, 0 through 9 and dash (-). Fully qualified domain
names may contain the character dot (.). No other characters,
including uppercase alphabetics and underscore will be accepted
anywhere in the name. In addition, site names and each section
of the domain name must begin with a lowercase alphabetic and
may *not* end with a dash.
The above applies to all names given on the #N and #F lines as
well as all names that appear in the link description portion of
your map entry. It does *not* apply to pseudo network names used
to help describe internal networks, as defined in the pathalias
documentation.
o - The link description of your entry as published by the UUCP Mapping
Project must generate pure "bang" paths. Essentially, the only
network character (as documented in the pathalias man page) allowed
in a published map entry will be the bang (!).
RFC976 defines the @ network character as having precedence over
the bang (!) when both appear in mixed mode addresses. This
essentially invalidates the use of the @ and other network
characters as they were commonly used in the UUCP community, except
at the local level.
As stated earlier, this announcement will have no effect on the vast
majority of you. However, it can have a profound effect on those who wish
to have their entry published but do not currently comply. For one, a
small percentage of you will have to change your site name. In doing so,
you'll have to contact all of your uucp neighbors and co-ordinate the
change with them. An even smaller percentage will have to change domain
names. We recognize that, for those of you who have to make some change,
doing so can be a vast undertaking. To that end, we do not plan to
publish another set of maps to the comp.mail.maps newsgroup until
September 11th. We hope that everyone will be able to affect the
necessary changes within the next 5 1/2 weeks. We recognize that domain
name changes will have to be co-ordinated with the NIC and will not take
any default action while that effort is working its way through the mill.
Members of the UUCP Zone having to make a domain name change due to this
announcement will not incur any additional fees or charges.
At posting time (September 11), the following default actions will take
place for any site or domain name that does not comply (except as
previously noted):
o - All uppercase characters in a sitename will be converted to lowercase.
o - Any sitename that begins with other than a lowercase alphabetic, ends
in other than a lowercase alphanumeric, or contains underscores will
cause either a link or an entire map entry to be dropped. If the
offending name is the map entry's name (#N) or the name of the
forwarder (#F) the entire map entry will be dropped. In all other
cases, the particular construct will be dropped. In general, this
will be the link in which the name is involved.
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, names containing dashes that *would* match
existing names containing underscores are now placed on reserve i.e.
the name "why-not" is on reserve for the site "why_not" and will
remain so until September 11th. Note, we will not actually make this
type of change for you. We're simply setting aside the most obvious
name that you might want to use for your site.
o - Any links that will cause pathalias to generate other than a pure
bang path will be modified such that a pure bang path will be
produced. Note that we will make an educated guess here. If you
don't want us guessing, update your map entry. In most cases, our
guess will consist of dropping the network character involved.
-Mel Pleasant (cbosgd!uucpmap)
-UUCP Mapping Project