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Path: utzoo!laura
From: laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Area-code as uucp domains
Message-ID: <3508@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-Feb-84 09:55:40 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.3508
Posted: Fri Feb  3 09:55:40 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 3-Feb-84 09:55:40 EST
References: <426@psuvax.UUCP>, <758@ulysses.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 70

3 years ago, it was easy. If you wanted to send to a site on the east coast
and north, you mailed decvax!site!person. If you wanted to send to a
site on the east coast and south you mailed duke!site. If you wanted
to mail to somebody on the west coast you mailed ucbvax!site and if
you wanted to mail somebody in the labs you mailed harpo!site.

Over at utzoo we talked to both decvax and duke and decvax talked to
ucbvax and harpo an everything was simple, except that there were 3
exceptions -- people who had gone to school at UC Berkeley and had
set up a connection to ucbvax even though they were in New England
and should have been talking to decvax by the scheme. Otherwise it
worked very well, and my mail never bounced.

Alas, there were fewer than 100 sites in those days. This solution
will not work. Ihnp4 is doing an awe-inspiring and marvellous job
at getting to people in the labs, but outside: gee -- I don't even
*know* where "propter" is, let alone who its biggest neighbours are.

What I see domains as is an attempt to make one machine responsible
for a magic area so that all mail sent to any machine in that area
can be sent through that site who can guarantee that the mail will
be delivered. If there is something more to domains, then would
somebody please explain it to me, because I have really looked and
that is all that I have found.

The basic assumptions here are as follows:

	the site routing information on the major site that is the
	omniscient one *must* be up to date. It must know how to
	get to all the other omniscient machines in all the other
	domains. This is rather easy -- the only difficulty arises
	when a new domain is created and for a short while all the
	omniscient machines may not know about it. The harder trick
	is to make sure that no new machine can be added to your
	domain whithout you hearing about it. if everybody new
	understood that they would send the site administrator mail
	at the major site saying "I just got frozzbozz my 68000 box
	up today and I now am polling gimpex in your domain so
	you have to know about me", but people don't seem to be
	doing this. I figure that awk script looking for people
	in your domain that you haven't heard about, quietly
	grinding away the spare cycles reading stuff in /usr/spool
	is the answer, but then an awk script is my answer to a lot
	of problems.

	domains are unique.

	domains (as one can see) are intimately connected with at least
	one machine in the domain (the one with the terrific and always
	up to date routing mechanism).

Okay? If I am wrong, let me know. How about we stop trying to map
domains into any sort of geographic model and just call them "decvax"
"ucbvax" and "ihnp4"? If ihnp4 wants to be the omniscient machine at
the domain that it wants to call "bell/at&t/weco/who-knows-what-next-week"
then this is up to them, though I think that ihnp4, for all its inelegance,
can be easily learned as "the name of the place you send stuff that is
going to the labs". I think that domains as machine names will emphasize
that the successful working of the domains depends on certain
system administrators in having (and keeping) their act in gear. 
There is also a certain amount of pride involved in being able to
say "I'm the ihnp4 in the domain ihnp4" which is a rather good thing
given all th work involved.

Comments?

-- 

Laura Creighton (NOTE NEW ADDRESS)
utzoo!laura