jmi@dac.mdcbbs.com (JM Ivler) (12/28/90)
I recently received some information on a product called UULINK from Vortex Technology. UULINK supports UUCP comunications on MS-DOS as well as NETNEWS and "a wide variety of miscellanous utilities". Does anyone have experience with this product? Is it worth the cost ($335.00 US)? Is setup easy? Is the documentation "useable"? In what ways is it better or worse than the stuff in the "public domain" (UUPC,Waffle,etc)? Thanks for the help. jmi jmi@dac.mdcbbs.com My opinions not DAC or MDC
paul@frcs.UUCP (Paul Nash) (12/30/90)
Thus spake jmi@dac.mdcbbs.com (JM Ivler): > I recently received some information on a product called UULINK from Vortex > Technology. UULINK supports UUCP comunications on MS-DOS as well as NETNEWS > and "a wide variety of miscellanous utilities". > > Does anyone have experience with this product? > Is setup easy? Is the documentation "useable"? In what ways is it better > or worse than the stuff in the "public domain" (UUPC,Waffle,etc)? Let me start with a caveat: I have only used UULINK v1.3. When I purchased it, there was a flyer explaining that v1.4 was in the pipeline, that there would be a _free_ upgrade, etc. I registered all four copies we bought, but have still not seen any sign of the upgrade. If v1.4 has come out in the meantime, the software might be very different now. However, the poor customer-service performance indicated above is a decided negative feature of the software. The installation is fairly straightforward. The executables and work files are _almost_ in standard Unix directories (eg: /usr/uucp for the binaries and configuration files, rather than /usr/bin and /usr/lib/uucp). The configuration files themselves are not quite HoneyDanBer, and not quite V7, more like 1/3 of each and 1/3 from nowhere. The documentation does not explain all the files and their contents very well - we found that uucico would crash for no apparent reason because a ``mail'' related file was missing. The /usr/spool/uucp directories are also almost Unix, but get around the DOS filename restrictions by putting the C., D. and X. files into separate directories. There are also separate IN. and OUT. directories. There is a UUXQT.EXE, which doesn't read Permissions and doesn't execute external programs. It has RMAIL and RNEWS built in. The mailer is _very_ crude. I have not tried UUPC or any of the others. UULINK does work, but I was not very happy with it. I would not feel happy recommending it to someone who has never set up UUCP links before, nor to someone who want to run standard configurations on both Unix and non-Unix machines. It is more complicated to configure than vanilla HDB UUCP under V.3, and does not have the excuse of ease-of-use for non- standardness. If you just need UUCICO, try UUPC first (it's free), and if it doesn't work, get UULINK if you must, but don't expect miracles. ---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=---=--- Paul Nash Flagship Wide Area Networks (Pty) Ltd paul@frcs.UUCP ...!uunet!ddsw1!proxima!frcs!paul