wales@valeria.cs.ucla.edu (Rich Wales) (10/21/89)
I am looking for a way to make the "pathalias" program generate routes
for UUCP-bound mail that will use an Internet host as the first hop
wherever possible.
The reason I want to do this is that we are on the Internet but have
only a sparse handful of UUCP neighbors. In virtually all cases, it
would make much more sense for us to send out UUCP-bound mail via some
Internet host than via one of our UUCP links. This situation is essen-
tially the opposite of what UUCP-only, non-Internet sites want to do.
What I would like to do is something like this (under control of a new
command-line option flag to the "pathalias" program, of course):
(1) Take the "domain equivalence" lines in the UUCP Map data (such as
"ucla-cs = cs.ucla.edu", or "uunet = uunet.uu.net"), and for each
such line assume a direct path from my site with a good priority
(such as DIRECT). That is, "pathalias" would act as if the follow-
ing path were listed in the map data (even though it really is not):
ucla-cs uunet(DIRECT)
(2) When outputting the "pathalias" data base, use a domain name wher-
ever possible for the "first hop" in any line. Thus, for instance,
our data base would contain the following line:
uunet uunet.uu.net!%s
(3) The mailer we would invoke for UUCP-bound mail ("smail", perhaps)
would treat a path starting with a domain-style name by sending the
mail out via the Internet. (Remember that, even if a site with a
domain-style name is not on the Internet, it should still have an MX
record in the domain data base, so we can still use the Internet
mechanisms to send the mail.)
Has anyone done this already? If so, please let me know. If not, I
guess I'll be diving into the "pathalias" program in order to add this
feature myself.
-- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683
3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA
wales@CS.UCLA.EDU ...!(uunet,ucbvax,rutgers)!cs.ucla.edu!wales
"These planets live fast and die hard. The question is . . . why?"honey@citi.umich.edu (Peter Honeyman) (11/15/89)
rich, wouldn't it make more sense for pathalias to assume a link to the domain, e.g., in your example, localname uunet.uu.net(SOMECOST) what cost to use? use an option arg, e.g, -w DEDICATED? should pathalias look for any old dotted addresses? badnews.uucp! i can't think of a cheap way (and palatable) way to recognize the right aliases. peter