brand@janus.Berkeley.EDU (Graham Brand) (09/22/90)
Can someone summarize what is necessary to connect a 386 machine running DOS (not UNIX) to the uucp network. You may assume that there is a uucp (UNIX) node that would be willing to be the entry point from the PC to the network. The sort of info that would be appreciated is: 1. Is it possible, if the PC is not running UNIX? 2. What MSDOS software is needed? 3. What special hardware is needed? The alternative approach of maintaining an account on the UNIX machine and explicitly dialing in via a modem is not what I am after. Thanks in advance, -Graham
winans@sirius.mcs.anl.gov (John Winans) (09/26/90)
In article <38792@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> brand@janus.Berkeley.EDU writes: >Can someone summarize what is necessary to connect a 386 machine running >DOS (not UNIX) to the uucp network. You may assume that there is a >uucp (UNIX) node that would be willing to be the entry point from the PC >to the network. The sort of info that would be appreciated is: > 1. Is it possible, if the PC is not running UNIX? Yes it is. But it depends on what you want to do between the nodes. If you only want uucp to work, just run uupc (available from your local archive server) I THINK I ftp'd mine from uunet but am not sure. It worked fine to send data to a SVR3.2 on a 386 machine and to send data to a DYNIX based Sequent balance. I never received any stuff, only used it to send stuff, but I did notice that you have to send the command strings to your modem "outside the program" in order to do any initialization (like to put it into ansewr mode etc...) Note that this all runs over R/S-232 (and perhaps modems and stuff, but a direct link would probably work ok.) {A Note: If you want an ethernet link b/w your DOS box and a UNIX box somewhere (and don't wany to lay out any cash for the software.) You should look at the NCSA telnet source (ftpable from just about everywhere). There are drivers (source!!) in there for many of the popular boards and the functions for passing IP packets (I see some stuff labeled TCP, but an not sure how much is there, I was only interested in IP when I was source gazing.) Anyhow, it looks like a down right usable set of packet passing software is there at the C function level, and it has a really cool configuration script that it uses to get its operating perameters. I rank it **** if you want that type of functionality.} > 2. What MSDOS software is needed? None other than the uupc stuff. > 3. What special hardware is needed? A com port and modem if you are remote. >The alternative approach of maintaining an account on the UNIX machine >and explicitly dialing in via a modem is not what I am after. It is funny to notice that that is what UUCP really is!! Except it is maintained by someone else. You mentioned in your Subject: line that usenet was of interest. You should be able hack up NNTP to use the NCSA telnet functions and run the I Have/Send Me protocol to a UNIX box via ethernet. When you do this, you will get each article in a seperate file. It should be easy to write your own filing system or just read them as is (not sorted by news group) and then delete them manually as they are read. If you are going to get usenet news via uucp, you should start reading the news.admin, news.software.* etc... newsgroups so you become familiar with the problems of compression, batching and so on. Sorry, but I have friends that want usenet feeds to off site locations too, and what they do is log in on their regular accounts, open a socket to our nntp server, and snarf the news to a file and kermit it home :-( I suppose this would still work for you... It depends on the type of UNIX that your server runs, you can set up your own crontab that does the same thing and then uucp's it to your DOS box. If you intend to run your DOS box as a news server on a LAN this would also work. But I am not familiar with what sort of news readers you could run under DOS. If it were me, I'd just unbundle the news into a tree like the way cnews does it. The users COULD cd around the tree and view the files with any word processor of file pager. You will have to expire the stuff too (or overflow). For this I'd just write a C program that walks the directory tree and deletes any files older than some specified date. That is what cnews actually does when it expires news except it allows you to specify different dates for each newsgroup if you want. (It also will check the Expires: date line if there is one in the posting.) If you want to run E-mail thru this thing, uupc has an email facility that (IMHO) is not all that great, but it works. And it would work over a LAN, but you would suffer file corruption problems if two people read from the same mailbox at the same time. You will also want to have the site admins that run the UNIX box that will act as our gateway set up some MX records so that your email can have a real internet address like: brandsbox@YourDosBox.ServerDomainName I can't remember how much you can lie to uucp, but you should be able to put a full machine name in there that would look like the above internet address. I stress that you have the MX records set up if you are going to use a fake internet address!!! Otherwise people on the real net will get peeved off because they won't ever be able to get mail to you (that is the people that would care enough to send the best ;-)) As far as the network goes in general, unless you have TCP/IP or slip access, ftp, telnet, rlogin and the like will be off limits to you. You'll pretty much be stuck with uucp and procomm. All of this should be true if you have a UNIX machine to act as your gateway. Email any responses, flames, marriage proposals, etc... I don't read this newsgroup very often. I'd post it as well if I were you, I see this question every other week on various newsgroups. There are a zillion others out there that need info too!!! When you get this mess finished, why don't you post an outline that describes what you did. A sort-of "Internet for the DOS user" or alternatively titled "Internet for Civilians". Hmmm... -- ! John Winans Advanced Computing Research Facility ! ! winans@mcs.anl.gov Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois ! ! ! !"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away"-- Tom Waite !