pritch@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Norm Pritchett) (04/26/89)
I would like to hear from individuals experienced in establishing a centralized electronic mail service for a large user base (4 figures or greater). Here at the Ohio State University we have a campus-wide token ring network interconnecting individually-administered departmental networks whose sizes range from a handful to hundreds. It is not very easy to provide a total count of hosts but it should be pretty close to a thousand. Some of our departments already implement one scheme or another for providing uniform addressing of mail for its users such that a sender need not be concerned with which particular machine to direct the message to. In these cases, the sender addresses the message to the department's Internet domain name (e.g. user@eng.ohio-state.edu or user@cis.ohio-state.edu) and the message is delivered to the recipient on his "home" machine. We would like to implement a similar scheme at the university-wide level where a sender could address a message to some-userid@ohio-state.edu and have the message delivered to the recipient on his home system. The major obstacle is with the "some-userid" part: we wish it to be representative of the recipient's real name (or actually be his real name) while at the same time have it uniquely identify him/her among the 75,000+ faculty, staff and students where there are numerous unresolvable name collisions. A format of Firstname.MI.Lastname which eliminates many collisions still leaves many remaining. If there is anyone who has experience in setting up a similar thing or has constructive advise, please correspond with me via mail at one of the following Internet addresses: pritch@cis.ohio-state.edu npritchett@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu pritchett@eng.ohio-state.edu -- Norm Pritchett, The Ohio State University College of Engineering Network Internet: pritchett@eng.ohio-state.edu BITNET: TS1703 at OHSTVMA UUCP: pritch@sydney.columbus.oh.us CCNET: ENG::PRITCHETT (6172::PRITCHETT)
pritch@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Norm Pritchett) (05/04/89)
I'd like to thank all those who answered my query regarding the subject of this posting. For those who wanted me share what I found, that will be forthcoming -- I still have messages coming in at a steady rate and I'd like to wait for them to trickle off before I share. From the collective responses I got I was able to devise a pretty good scheme. I won't share it yet because some ideas are still being hashed out among some fellow networking folks on campus but if you are familiar with DND there's a lot of similarity to that. In my original posting I (intentionally) didn't present an accurate idea of the size of userbase we had to address because I didn't want to disuade some people from responding just because they thought their system wouldn't work for us. I mentioned 4 figures or larger in my message -- what we really need is a scheme that will comfortably handle a population in excess of 75,000. If some of you have thought about trying to develop such a system this large but have been disuaded for some reason or another (I've heard from a few such places) I think we've got something for you... stay tuned. -- Norm Pritchett, The Ohio State University College of Engineering Network Internet: pritchett@eng.ohio-state.edu BITNET: TS1703 at OHSTVMA UUCP: pritch@sydney.columbus.oh.us CCNET: ENG::PRITCHETT (6172::PRITCHETT)