joe@hanauma.stanford.edu (Joe Dellinger) (07/15/89)
It seems to me aggressive rerouting assumes that the UUCP maps
are accurate, if not complete. How many people have had to put up with
sites that had grossly inaccurate information, and WOULD NOT fix it?
Here is a horror story:
There was a reasonably well-connected ancient site on the east
coast (to remain nameless) that advertised calling us (and several other
sites) "HOURLY" when in fact "WEEKLY*2" would have been more accurate.
EVERY #^@*!&$^#!@ rerouter in the country would reroute mail to us through
them... and the mail would wait a week to get in to their machine, and then
wait another week to get out to our machine. As a result there were many
sites that I could send mail to in under 10 minutes, but _their_ reply
back to me would take 2-3 weeks to arrive!
We begged the screwed-up site _literally for years_ to fix their
entry, and they always replied and said they would soon, but in fact they
_never did_. Finally we got another major site (apple) to agree to help
us out by listing us with an even higher bogus connect frequency ("dunt esk").
Now all the rerouters route through "apple" instead, which actually does
connect with us reasonably often.
Eventually the UUCP map coordinators got enough complaints about the
troublesome site that they changed _all_ its connection frequencies to "DEAD".
This was about 3 years after we first started having problems. I don't know
how often this little scenario has been played out net-wide, but I suspect
our experience wasn't unique. This episode has made me generally
unappreciative of the virtues of rerouting!
\ /\ /\ /\/\/\/\/\/\/\.-.-.-.-.......___________
\ / \ / \ /Dept of Geophysics, Stanford University \/\/\.-.-....___
\/ \/ \/Joe Dellinger joe@hanauma.stanford.edu apple!hanauma!joe\/\.-._