[news.newusers.questions] How do I find the domain of a friend?

raulmill@usc.edu (Raul) (08/16/89)

I have a friend who goes to another school (Cal State University,
Northridge) who is also a new user.  She claims she has unix access
there, but doesn't know her way around the system.  I can contact her
occasionally by various means, but I'd like to try email.  Is there
any way of finding out what kind of domain CSUN is in?  I have her
user-id written down somewhere, I just need some kind of pointer to
locate CSUN on the net.

Thanks,

--
Raul Rockwell                                      |
INTERNET:   raulmill@usc.edu                       |
UUCP:       ...uunet!usc!raulmill                  |  55 mph = 82 nc
U.S.SNAIL:  721 E Windsor #4,  GLENDALE CA  91205  |
Raul Rockwell                                      |
INTERNET:   raulmill@usc.edu                       |
UUCP:       ...uunet!usc!raulmill                  |  55 mph = 82 nc
U.S.SNAIL:  721 E Windsor #4,  GLENDALE CA  91205  |

mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) (08/16/89)

In article <RAULMILL.89Aug15125739@usc.edu> raulmill@usc.edu (Raul) writes:
>I have a friend who goes to another school (Cal State University,
>Northridge) who is also a new user.  She claims she has unix access
>there, but doesn't know her way around the system.  I can contact her
>occasionally by various means, but I'd like to try email.  Is there
>any way of finding out what kind of domain CSUN is in?  I have her
>user-id written down somewhere, I just need some kind of pointer to
>locate CSUN on the net.

From UUCP map u.usa.ca.1:

    #N	csun.edu, csun
    #S	Sun-2/170; SunOS 3.5
    #O	California State University, Northridge	(CSUN)
    #C	Larry Wake
    #E	postmaster@csun.edu
    #T	+1 818 885 3966	(ATSS 8-672-3966)
    #P	CSUN Computer Center, Mail Drop	CCAD, Northridge, CA 91330
    #L	34 14 N	/ 118 32 W
    #U	polyslo	csuchico csusac	csustan	sdsu csuf3b fedeva dcrlg1 srhqla
    #W	lkw@csun.edu (Larry Wake); Wed Jun  7 09:53:07 PDT 1989
    #R	csun.edu [130.166.1.1] on the Internet.
    csun	.csun.edu
    csun=	csun.edu, csun.csun.edu

The UUCP maps are posted to newsgroup comp.mail.maps and are probably
the single most valuable source of information about how to contact
other sites, particularly if you're trying to get from one network
to another. Check with the postmaster at your site to find out if
the maps are being squirrelled away somewhere. If not, some delicate
screaming is in order. 

Since you're on the Internet, all you need to do is send mail to
"username@csun.edu" and if they have a name server it should get to
her. If not, you'll need to find out which host she has an account
on and send mail to "username@hostname.csun.edu".

>--
>Raul Rockwell                                      |
>INTERNET:   raulmill@usc.edu                       |
>UUCP:       ...uunet!usc!raulmill                  |  55 mph = 82 nc
>U.S.SNAIL:  721 E Windsor #4,  GLENDALE CA  91205  |
>Raul Rockwell                                      |
>INTERNET:   raulmill@usc.edu                       |
>UUCP:       ...uunet!usc!raulmill                  |  55 mph = 82 nc
>U.S.SNAIL:  721 E Windsor #4,  GLENDALE CA  91205  |

Your signature is broken, Raul. Try again.

-- 
Dave Mack

dbilar@antares.UUCP (Dave Bilar) (08/17/89)

In article <5446@inco.UUCP> mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) writes:
>In article <RAULMILL.89Aug15125739@usc.edu> raulmill@usc.edu (Raul) writes:
>>I have a friend who goes to another school (Cal State University,
>>Northridge)

>From UUCP map u.usa.ca.1:
>    #N	csun.edu, csun
>    #O	California State University, Northridge	(CSUN)
>    #C	Larry Wake
>    #E	postmaster@csun.edu
[...]
>    #U	polyslo	csuchico csusac	csustan	sdsu csuf3b fedeva dcrlg1 srhqla
[...]

Notice how many sites in #U above have "csu" as part of ther names?
The CSU maintains a net linking its campuses.  If you can find a link
from usc to csu[xxxx] your mail will move rather quickly over dedicated
lines, once it reaches CSU-NET (or whatever they call it.)  A quick scan
of u.usa.ca.1[thru 10] for "csun" with your favorite editor is certainly
called for.  If you search for your site's name, you may find a neighbor
site which is already connected to csun.  Who knows?

>The UUCP maps are posted to newsgroup comp.mail.maps and are probably
>the single most valuable source of information about how to contact
>other sites,    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
[...]

Hear! Hear!         (here! here!  ?????) :-)

>
>Since you're on the Internet, all you need to do is send mail to
>"username@csun.edu" and if they have a name server it should get to
>her. If not, you'll need to find out which host she has an account
>on and send mail to "username@hostname.csun.edu".
>

I have found it time well spent, although very time consuming, to
subscribe to comp.mail.maps, and create a KILL file of all the maps I'm
not interested in.  This takes quite some time, and can be easily be done
as a "background" process at times when your boss isn't looking. :-)
This is easy for me thanks to windowing software or using two CRT's.
(Be sure to switch yourself back to the foreground process before too long!)
Once I got the KILL file created, only the *.ca articles got through
(plus a few more from a time when I wanted to find a university in Ohio...
I'll have to re-kill the Ohio maps next time.)  It takes some time to go
through an entire world of "new" articles in comp.mail.maps, killing each
one, but the result outweighs the problem.  

Good Luck...

>>--
>>Raul Rockwell                                      |
>>INTERNET:   raulmill@usc.edu                       |
>>UUCP:       ...uunet!usc!raulmill                  |  55 mph = 82 nc
>>U.S.SNAIL:  721 E Windsor #4,  GLENDALE CA  91205  |
>
>Your signature is broken, Raul. Try again.

...not if one uses the Kill function of their editor...:-)

>
>-- 
>Dave Mack

Hey Dave--Got any openings over there? :-(

--
Dave Bilar,  KA6UQJ     Speaking only for himself...
UUCP: {uunet,ames,pyramid}oliveb!tymix!antares!dbilar
USPS: McDonnell Douglas Network Systems Co., PO Box: 49019,
      ATTN: Mailstop F21, San Jose, Ca. 95161-9019   (408)922-8078
"Remember:  its not _just_ an electric bulb, its a Dark Sucker!"

lwake@pitstop.West.Sun.COM (Larry Wake) (08/17/89)

In article <477@antares.UUCP> dbilar@antares.UUCP (Dave Bilar) writes:
>In article <5446@inco.UUCP> mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) writes:
>>In article <RAULMILL.89Aug15125739@usc.edu> raulmill@usc.edu (Raul) writes:
>>>I have a friend who goes to another school (Cal State University,
>>>Northridge)
>
>>From UUCP map u.usa.ca.1:
>>    #N	csun.edu, csun
>>    #O	California State University, Northridge	(CSUN)
>>    #C	Larry Wake
>>    #E	postmaster@csun.edu
>[...]
>
>A quick scan
>of u.usa.ca.1[thru 10] for "csun" with your favorite editor is certainly
>called for.  If you search for your site's name, you may find a neighbor
>site which is already connected to csun.  Who knows?

Who knows, indeed...

Unless they haven't updated their map, you'll find that in fact the
closest site to USC with a UUCP link to CSUN is USC itself.  However,
this is *not* the best way to go about sending mail if you're at a site
that knows what it's about, such as USC.  Use domain routing!  As
previous articles suggested, your best bet is to send to addresses in
the form

    user@host.domain

where "user" is their user ID or alias, "host" is the machine name or a
name assigned to a group of machines, and "domain" is the domain name
assigned to the site (csun.edu, in the case of CSUN).  If your friend
has user ID "jane" on host "afws" at CSUN, her address is:

    jane@afws.csun.edu

In a perfect universe, you needn't worry about how it gets there; just
sit back and admire the network in all its glory.  In an imperfect
universe, yell and scream until it becomes perfect.  Eschew the "!" and
all it implies, for in that direction lies madness.

In fact, this is a particularly good example of Why Explicit Routing is
Bad.  If you indeed saw in the maps that usc connects to csun, and used
the bangpath, your mail would queue up until the next time csun called
usc (usc no longer ever initiates a UUCP call, even if outgoing mail is
queued), which might be in twenty minutes, or it might be in a day or
so.  If instead you used the domain address, the message would be
delivered over the Internet, usually within seconds.  (Unless
CERFnet/Los Nettos routing was munged, but that's certainly another
story for another time.)

BTW, to answer the original question "How do I find the domain of a
friend?", the best answer is "have the friend ask their local user
services group or system administrator."  Until such things become
automated and standardized, it doesn't make much sense to try to guess
someone's mail address from the outside when it's likely that your
friend can find out the answer much more quickly and accurately from
the inside.

Larry Wake
No longer postmaster@csun.edu, but still
keeping an eye on things from time to time.

epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) (08/17/89)

In article <RAULMILL.89Aug15125739@usc.edu> raulmill@usc.edu (Raul) writes:
>I have a friend who goes to another school (Cal State University,
>Northridge) who is also a new user.  She claims she has unix access
>there, but doesn't know her way around the system.  I can contact her
>occasionally by various means, but I'd like to try email.  Is there
>any way of finding out what kind of domain CSUN is in?  I have her
>user-id written down somewhere, I just need some kind of pointer to
>locate CSUN on the net.

Various means sound like a good idea given that Northridge is
"the next valley over" from where you are.

BTW, try CSUN.EDU.

					-=EPS=-

mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) (08/19/89)

In article <5446@inco.UUCP> I wrote:
>Since you're on the Internet, all you need to do is send mail to
>"username@csun.edu" and if they have a name server it should get to
>her. If not, you'll need to find out which host she has an account
>on and send mail to "username@hostname.csun.edu".

Since posting this, I have been informed (translation: been beaten
savagely about the head and shoulders and told) that name servers
do not, in general, do mail routing within domains.

My sincere apologies to anyone who has spent the last few days trying to 
get their name server to route mail.

Apparently this means that some poor bozo has to add
aliases to /usr/lib/aliases on the gateway machine to get mail routed
to the correct host.  Those who are interested in this subject should
probably read comp.mail.misc.

In addition:

>>--
>>Raul Rockwell                                      |
>>INTERNET:   raulmill@usc.edu                       |
>>UUCP:       ...uunet!usc!raulmill                  |  55 mph = 82 nc
>>U.S.SNAIL:  721 E Windsor #4,  GLENDALE CA  91205  |
>>Raul Rockwell                                      |
>>INTERNET:   raulmill@usc.edu                       |
>>UUCP:       ...uunet!usc!raulmill                  |  55 mph = 82 nc
>>U.S.SNAIL:  721 E Windsor #4,  GLENDALE CA  91205  |
>
>Your signature is broken, Raul. Try again.

I also got flamed about this. So let me try once more, using small
words so no one will misunderstand:

Raul, did you know that you have two copies of your signature at the
bottom of your message? This is a Bad Thing, and you should think
about finding out why it happened and prevent it from happening
again. OK?

Arrgh. Picky, picky, picky.

-- 
Dave Mack

wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) (08/19/89)

>Since you're on the Internet, all you need to do is send mail to
>"username@csun.edu" and if they have a name server it should get to
>her.

Bzzzz. Wrong answer. Not many institutions have established any kind of
centralized e-mail server. It is not safe to assume that CSUN has. (For
all I know, they may have done just that. But the quoted sentence seems
to say that you can send mail to anyone, anywhere, through some handy
server machine. Wrong.)

>     If not, you'll need to find out which host she has an account
>on and send mail to "username@hostname.csun.edu".

Ding ding ding.

epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) (08/19/89)

All 19 campuses of the California State University (and a few
other things) are connected by a statewide 56Kb network, with
plans to upgrade to T-1 service.  Last I checked the Internet
connection was through the San Diego Supercomputer Center, with a
T-1 link "Real Soon Now" from CSU's Southwestern Research Labs in
Los Alamitos to CERFNET via UC Irvine.  Those campuses that are
not yet IP-connected are still waiting for the magic Cisco boxes
that will gateway their networks to CSUNET-IP.  Just because a
campus has Internet connectivity doesn't mean you can get there
from here--many campuses have missing or inaccurate Internet
registrations; for example, CSU Sacramento thinks it's CSUS.EDU,
but it's not registered with WHOIS and unknown to DNS.

Here are the WHOIS summaries for the California State University;
the few hosts that appear here are probably domain name servers.
Each domain may well have several hundred hosts hiding behind it.
Northridge chose to accept mail addressed to the secondary domain
(CSUN.EDU).  This is unusual; in most cases you will have to
identify a specific host (e.g. POLYSLO.CALPOLY.EDU).

					-=EPS=-

Cal Poly State University (BLACKBIRD1) BLACKBIRD1.CALPOLY.EDU	   129.65.17.3
Cal Poly State University (CALPOLY-DOM)				   CALPOLY.EDU
California Polytechnic State University (NET-CALPOLY) CALPOLY	    129.65.0.0
California State Polytechnic University - Pomona (NET-CSUPOM) CSUPOM134.71.0.0
California State University at Fresno (CSUFRESNO-DOM)		 CSUFRESNO.EDU
California State University at Fresno (NET-CSUFRESNO) CSUFRESNO	     129.8.0.0
California State Univeristy at Stanislaus (KOKO) KOKO.CSUSTAN.EDU   130.17.1.4
California State Univeristy at Stanislaus (SCG1-CSUSTAN) SCG1.CSUSTAN.EDU
								    130.17.1.2
California State University at Stanislaus (CSUSTAN-DOM)		   CSUSTAN.EDU
California State University, Chico (NET-CSUCHICO) CSUCHICO	   132.241.0.0
California State University, Hayward (NET-CSUH-NET) CSUH-NET	   134.154.0.0
California State University, Long Beach (NET-CSULB-IP) CSULB-IP	   134.139.0.0
California State University, Los Angeles (CALSTATELA-DOM)	CALSTATELA.EDU
California State University, Los Angeles (NET-CSULANET)	CSULANET   130.182.0.0
California State University, Northridge (ALICE)	ALICE.CSUN.EDU	  130.166.4.19
California State University, Northridge (CSUN) CSUN.EDU		   130.166.1.1
California State University, Northridge (CSUN-DOM)		      CSUN.EDU
California State University, Northridge (NET-CSUN) CSUN		   130.166.0.0
California State University, Northridge (TIM-CSUN) TIM.CSUN.EDU	   130.166.4.4
California State University, Stanislaus (NET-CSUSTAN) CSUSTAN	    130.17.0.0
California State University (CALSTATE-DOM)			  CALSTATE.EDU
California State University (NET-CSUNET-IP) CSUNET-IP		   130.150.0.0
California State University (NET-CSUSAC) CSUSAC			    130.86.0.0
San Diego State University (NET-SDSU-NET) SDSU-NET		   130.191.0.0
San Diego State University (SDSU) SDSU.EDU			130.191.229.14
San Diego State University (SDSU-DOM)				      SDSU.EDU
San Francisco State University (GIBBS1)	GIBBS.SFSU.EDU		 130.212.12.64
San Francisco State University (NET-FOGNET) FOGNET		   130.212.0.0
San Francisco State University (SFSU-DOM)			      SFSU.EDU
San Francisco State University (SUTRO) SUTRO.SFSU.EDU		130.212.15.230
San Jose State University (SJSU-DOM)				      SJSU.EDU
Sonoma State University (FACRESCTR) FACRESCTR.SONOMA.EDU	   130.157.2.5
Sonoma State University (NET-SONOMA-STATE) SONOMA-STATE		   130.157.0.0
Sonoma State University (SONOMA-DOM)				    SONOMA.EDU
Sonoma State University (SPEAR-SONOMA) SPEAR.SONOMA.EDU		   130.157.2.6

epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) (08/19/89)

In article <5455@inco.UUCP> mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) writes:
>Since posting this, I have been informed (translation: been beaten
>savagely about the head and shoulders and told) that name servers
>do not, in general, do mail routing within domains.

I don't think most readers understand what this means; while the
Domain Name Service has the capability to provide information
about individual user mailboxes, most sites use alternative
facilities (which predate DNS, "ain't broke and don't need
fixing") for the per-user stuff.

"Routing" as uucpers understand it (i.e. per-host) is most
definitely done within domains, and name servers are  very much
responsible for making this work right.

					-=EPS=-

mikeh@dell.dell.com (Mike Hammel) (08/22/89)

In article <446@wet.UUCP> epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) writes:
>I don't think most readers understand what this means; while the
>Domain Name Service has the capability to provide information
>about individual user mailboxes, most sites use alternative
>facilities (which predate DNS, "ain't broke and don't need
>fixing") for the per-user stuff.
>
>"Routing" as uucpers understand it (i.e. per-host) is most
>definitely done within domains, and name servers are  very much
>responsible for making this work right.
>
I'm sort of new to this too.  I take it what you mean here is that the
name server functionality (providing centralized routing information for
a domain) is not the dominant structure in use.  For the most part individual
hosts maintain the domain routing information locally.  Is this right?

Michael J. Hammel   | UUCP(preferred): ...!cs.utexas.edu!dell!Kepler!mjhammel
Dell Computer Corp. | Also: ...!dell!mikeh  or 73377.3467@compuserve.com
Austin, TX	    | Phone: 512-338-4400 ext 7169  
"I know engineers, they looooove to change things" L. McCoy
Disclaimer: These are my views, not those of my employers. So there.