Classic Comp UUCP network.

From: Jay West <west_at_tseinc.com>
Date: Sat Feb 9 14:08:37 2002

You wrote....

----- Original Message -----
> I think the pursuit of this is motivated by many of the same reasons
> people are interested in vintage hardware.

Ah - a reasoned explanation. That's what I was looking for. Thanks!

> For me, it would be the opportunity to play with UUCP. I've always been
> curious about how the whole thing works. My first exposure to Unix and
> Usenet was on a system with a UUCP based Usenet feed. Since those days,
> I've had plenty of opportunity to configure almost every Unix based
> service under the sun due to work related neccessity. The primary
> expection being UUCP.

I have actually configured very large UUCP networks in the past. A large
percentage of our customers used UUCP to get their mail feeds from us, so I
was quite familiar with it. I still have the O'Reilly book you mentioned.
I'm still looking for what people are wanting to DO with this UUCP network,
as that certainly determines if it's a "square peg in a round hole", or just
the right tool for the job. Let the desired solution dictate the tool.

> I think the idea of having an independent netnews system is pretty
> interesting. Using sendmail to handle messaging over UUCP would be fun.
> I've no clue how to do this, as TCP/IP has always been present on all
> the systems I've used. Experimenting with filesharing over UUCP would
> likewise be educational, at least for me.

I have exactly a clue how to do this ;) I agree this would be a lot of fun
to set up, and am somewhat interested in it, but still looking to make sure
that this approach gives people the solution they want.

> Whether there are enough people with enough resources and interest to
> maintain this sort of endeavour, I don't know. My impression,
> especially after reading some of the _Managing uucp and Usenet_ book, is
> that UUCP died out in part because of there being too many different
> ways to configure a system depending on your hardware, your OS, your
> version of UUCP, and your modem type. Some of the can be eliminated by
> using simple, and now prevalent, TCP/IP connections. For those unable
> or unwiling to taint the purity of this experiment, dial-up gateways
> would be needed.

UUCP tends to be quite maintenance intensive. And yes, for many systems it
is fairly troublesome to set up.

> So, if someone asks "Why?" what specifically do they mean? Is their
> question, "Why would you use UUCP when you can use TCP/IP?" Or is it,
> "Why would you used UUCP when you can't use it to access the web or FTP
> or to have realtime chats with people?" That sort of reasoning doesn't
> really follow with nature of the people who camp out here. You may as
> well be asking, "Why would you use that PDP-8 when you could be running
> Windows 2000 or Linux on a 1.6GHz Pentium IV PC?" Or, "Why do you run
> RT-11? There aren't any MP3 players for it and you can't play any of
> the new games on it."

I certainly would never ask why someone would run an old antique computer as
opposed to modern technology. I was only asking so that I could see if there
was some problem, some need, that this could be used to address. Not that it
HAS to, I just felt I was missing the originating need for it. If there
isn't one, that's fine too. Just curious.

> Actually, I'm sort of surprised we aren't already running an extensive
> UUCP network... The only reason I can guess as to /why that is/ would be
> that everyone's too busy collecting old computer systems to actually do
> something on a grander scale with them.

Starting a new network, separate from the Internet - is generally a much
more daunting task than you might imagine. There is co-ordination, and be
necessity administration,. policies, etc. If you think that wouldn't be
needed, then try going back over the past few months of list posts and you
might find many folks can't agree on things here (not that that's bad in my
opinion).

Yes, I would be happy to offer some servers on my network as hubs for the
traffic. Controlled datacenter environment, certainly extremely good
bandwidth availability, etc.

Regards,

Jay West
Received on Sat Feb 09 2002 - 14:08:37 GMT