jim@tiamat.fsc.com (Jim O'Connor) (07/13/89)
tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes: >Ah'm just a simpul country lawyuh <snuffle>, but isn't the following true? > * If I am site X, and site Y is a direct neighbor of mine whom I poll > daily or better (maybe better than anyone else if it's worse than daily), > but I see a piece of incoming mail of the form a!b!X!c!d!e!Y!f!g, > then it's reasonable for me to reroute it as a!b!X!Y!f!g. Not necessarily. Assuming I'm from site "a", I may have a perfectly legitimate reason, which since you are not my direct neighbor, you probably wouldn't have any way to know, for why I want the message to take that route. If a!b!X!Y!f!g is really the better path, than it's up to me to keep MY routing info current, or to use a site that I trust to keep their info current as a rerouter. If you argue that "Well, you have no way of knowing about my direct link to Y because it's unpublished, therefore I'm doing you a favor", well do me a bigger favor and publish the link. Private links are common, but should be just that - private. If my mail were to fail on Y and I don't know how it got there, I will be at a disadvantage on how to rectify the situation. > * If my link to site Y is sick, then I ought to respect the longer path. How will you know it's sick, and what current MTA has a "don't reroute if link is sick" option? > * If no site in the bang path is a direct neighbor of mine, then I ought > to consult pathalias for the link to the site named rightward of mine, > and leave the rest of it the hell alone. That one sounds good. In this case if I'm "a" you really are doing me a favor since I've gone and generated a faulty path. If this can be rerouted, then great. But if there is no problem with the path, it should be left alone. > * In the first case mentioned above, if site Y does not know me by > name (i.e., the bang path is not reversible), then I ought to respect > the longer supplied path. [I think this is where most mail bounces > these days, no?] Just out of curiousity, why would you even bother with a one-way uucp link used for mail purposes? (I understand, and use, one-way anon uucp links for file pick ups.) ------------- James B. O'Connor jim@tiamat.fsc.com Filtration Sciences Corporation 615/821-4022 x. 651 *** Altos users unite! mail to "info-altos-request@tiamat.fsc.com" ***
scs@itivax.iti.org (Steve C. Simmons) (07/14/89)
karl@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: >clewis@eci386.uucp writes: >> It also appears obvious that anyone giving an explicit bang path >> (eg: a!b!c!d) may very well know what they're doing, and it shouldn't be >> touched. >Not so. A random sampling of 263 !-paths which passed through my >system earlier this month (I picked a few wholly arbitrary "grep" >criteria on /usr/spool/uucp/mail.log) revealed that the average !-path >length is more than twice as long as the average length of a path in >/usr/lib/uucp/paths. The users do not know what they are doing. >They're guessing, and badly so. I think we're being a bit too hard on those users here. There are several contributing factors that (probably) make this an inappropriate conclusion. The first obvious culpret is replying to news. Rn (Rnmail?) has generated some really horrendous paths for me to mail 'next door'. Like 20 or so hops. Since a lot of folks have MTAs that don't understand '@' addresses, we're likely to see this sort of pathing until they all fix their mailers. Real Soon Now. :-(. The second is the way a number of the MUAs work. Elm, mush, mailx, etc, can all wind up being configured such that they generate the return path by reversal. While this might be considered Evile (sic) and Rude, if your MTA don't understand '@', it's the only choice. So you wind up generating these bizarre and convoluted paths *and the user never sees them*. They're depending on the MTA to figure out what is needed to reply, *and they should*. -- Steve Simmons scs@vax3.iti.org Industrial Technology Institute Ann Arbor, MI. "Velveeta -- the Spam of Cheeses!" -- Uncle Bonsai
news@amms4.UUCP (news administration) (07/14/89)
In article <626@tiamat.fsc.com> jim@tiamat.fsc.com (Jim O'Connor) writes: >Just out of curiousity, why would you even bother with a one-way uucp link >used for mail purposes? (I understand, and use, one-way anon uucp links for >file pick ups.) Well, as it happens, I have one-way uucp links into amms4. We have no outgoing phone line from amms4, but that is where news lives, and where most mail is originated from. The out-bound link is thru amms2, which is connected to amms4 via 2 dedicated links (uucp, one each way - I know, ethernet is better, but it isn't an option here). As a result of this, I occasionally send mail along the following path, just to clear out the spooling directory: amms4!amms2!some_other_system!amms4!hjg God help me if my mailer were to be smart enough to short-circuit that path. (As to why this is even necessary: at least one of the sites that provides the dual-link [amms2 & amms4] is unwilling to poll amms4 regularly, so if something hangs around for more than a day, I have to prod it - ugh - I'm seriously thinking of dropping said link(s) as being too much trouble - but that's a different story :-). -- Harry Gross | reserved for | something really Internet: hjg@amms4.UUCP (we're working on registering)| clever - any UUCP: {jyacc, rna, bklyncis}!amms4!hjg | suggestions?
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (07/18/89)
In article <2141@itivax.iti.org> scs@itivax.iti.org (Steve C. Simmons) writes: >The first obvious culpret is replying to news. Rn (Rnmail?) has generated >some really horrendous paths for me to mail 'next door'. Like 20 or so >hops. Since a lot of folks have MTAs that don't understand '@' addresses, >we're likely to see this sort of pathing until they all fix their >mailers. Real Soon Now. :-(. Did anyone think that people typed those 20-hop paths by hand? Especially people who don't know what they are doing? Replies to news articles and subsequent replies to those messages are almost certainly the source of everything the rabid rerouters complain about. So, why not fix it in the news software by making hosts that are capable of re-routing rewrite the Path: line so that mail following the Path: will be "dynamically" re-routed? That way the dumber downstream sites don't need to change anything (any they probably won't anyway). >The second is the way a number of the MUAs work. Elm, mush, mailx, etc, >can all wind up being configured such that they generate the return >path by reversal. While this might be considered Evile (sic) and Rude, >if your MTA don't understand '@', it's the only choice. So you wind >up generating these bizarre and convoluted paths *and the user never >sees them*. They're depending on the MTA to figure out what is needed >to reply, *and they should*. Reversing a good path should not give you a bizarre and convoluted path, although it will only work if the connections appear the same from both directions (generally true for uucp sites) or gateway sites rewrite the path as necessary to make it reversable. Les Mikesell