jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest) (11/08/90)
Here's another question concerning sendmail 5.65+IDA. [Thanks to all those people who put me in thge picture regarding MB records}. Has anyone in the UK started using this configuration yet? For those people who live outside (the UK that is), we have a special problem when it comes to sendmail. Several years ago an august quasi-government body called The Computer Board decided on a mailing/remove access scheme as defined in a number of ``Coloured Books''. In the main this relates to how mail, file transfer, and remote transfer takes place between UK universities etc. Sendmail can (easily?) deal with this by using a special mailer. However, there is a problem, and the problem is the address notation. In the ``grey book'' notation, my mail address is defined as: jf@uk.ac.umist.co.ap note the back-to-front nature. Now most, if not all, UK mailers will understand the RFC format. On our node (we rely on a relay to access the outside world), we deal almost exclusively with RFC format - we type RFC formats, and we transmit with RFC formats, as in the rest of the world. The one sop to the UK tradition is that if we receive mail in the previous format, we turn it round. This is encoded by our mods to the Berkeley M4 files. At the moment, in traditional fashion, we will reverse anything that looks like a UK format - for example, umist.co.ap is converted to ap.co.umist, which we look up with BIND to get ap.co.umist.ac.uk. In the future, we might just do this for fully expanded reversed names. Anyway, back to the original question. Has anyone already altered the Sendmail 5.65+IDA setup so it will cope with reversed names? I know how to do it, but it would save alot of hassle. John Forrest, Dept. of Computation, UMIST. PS. I know New Zealand people used the grey book as well, so they might have the same problem?
mark@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Mark Davies) (11/10/90)
In article <1990Nov8.103002@ap.co.umist.ac.uk> jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest) writes: >PS. I know New Zealand people used the grey book as well, so they might have he >same problem? No sorry. We threw away the coloured book stuff a while ago. The New Zealand universities are now linked via an IP network and are part of the Internet. cheers mark
Andy.Linton@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Andy Linton) (11/12/90)
In article <1990Nov8.103002@ap.co.umist.ac.uk>, jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest) writes: |> PS. I know New Zealand people used the grey book as well, so they |> might have the |> same problem? We have solved this problem in the only sensible way there is - we have thrown the Grey Book ordering in the bin. I have no desire to resurrect the old ordering debate - I heard all the arguments when I was postmaster at Newcastle upon Tyne - but please don't start adding all that nonsense into sendmail. It is complex enough. If the rumours that I hear about the impending arrival of TCP/IP and proper Internet connections in the UK are true, then the addition of Grey Book format names into the DNS will cause confusion and grief to all concerned. The sensible solution when this happens is to drop the use of Grey Book ordering and choose the format used by the majority of the world. Until the Grey Book name style disappears, the proper thing to do is to reverse the orders inside sendmail.cf, treat RFC822 ordering as the canonical form and rewrite in Grey Book form only when necessary. Surely Jim Crammond's UK Sendmail 2.1(?) has rules for this or contact the current <postmaster@newcastle.ac.uk>
C.R.Ritson@newcastle.ac.uk (C.R. Ritson) (11/12/90)
In article <1990Nov11.203113.1002@comp.vuw.ac.nz>, Andy.Linton@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Andy Linton) writes: >Until the Grey Book name style disappears, the proper thing to do is to >reverse the orders inside sendmail.cf, treat RFC822 ordering as the >canonical form and rewrite in Grey Book form only when necessary. > >Surely Jim Crammond's UK Sendmail 2.1(?) has rules for this or contact >the current <postmaster@newcastle.ac.uk> Yes, we still work like this. I cannot vouch for UK-sendmail 2.1, we have still not started using it. We are using a sendmail.cf based on the output of an earlier UK-sendmail. (Sorry, Newcastle people will see this twice, I forgot to modify the distribution the first time). Chris Ritson (former postmaster@newcastle.ac.uk)