lauren@LBL-UNIX@sri-unix (11/25/82)
From: Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren@LBL-UNIX> Date: Tue Nov 23 1982 00:18:53 PST I'm glad someone reminded me about that. I would be VERY careful about using that ;login writeup of my talk about UUCP. As I said at the talk, I was only giving an overview, and (at the time) I had not actually finished getting my packet driver completely working. There were a number of VERY IMPORTANT facets of the protocol that I did not discuss at that talk, and I discovered later that some of what I did discuss was overly simplified (and in at least one case, just plain wrong from the standpoint of many UUCP implementations -- they DO vary!) I tried to stuff an awful lot of information into 1/2 hour -- far too much to keep things sufficiently clear, I'm afraid. In the process of getting my actual packet driver up (the one that will deliver this message) I found a number of protocol compatibility/ lockup/timeout problems, plus a number of problems inside Unix UUCP itself. Some of these situations did not turn up until I had my homegrown packet driver running fulltime with a "normal" traffic load (talking to Unix systems running under widely varying load averages.) The upshot of all this is that I now consider my Usenix talk to have been useful for giving the "flavor" of the protocol, but not particularly useful (or at least, incomplete and somewhat misleading) in terms of some of the protocol details. Anyone attempting to build a packet driver from those notes would have a pretty rough time of it, even assuming that the notes themselves were completely accurate (I have never seen them in ;login, nor did I see them prior to publication.) I really should write down all the UUCP details in a concise manner -- before I get hit by a truck, or get kidnapped by a bunch of crazed protocol hackers... --Lauren--