Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP 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