Ron Hudson <rhudson_at_cnonline.net> wrote:
> I don't know how UUCP works, is there a good primer out
> on the net somewhere?
Try these:
http://www.uucp.org/
http://www.airs.com/ian/uucp-doc/
uucp is really a file transfer mechanism (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) with some
remote-job-execution stuff layered on top of it. One host sends a
file to another host along with instructions to run some commands that
use the file, e.g. "rmail" to process a received mail message or
"rnews" to process a received news batch. Hosts generally have some
idea about what commands they will allow other hosts to ask them to
execute.
uucp can use any of several different protocols; the administrators at
each end of a link choose a protocol based on the sort of link (e.g.
whether it's 7- or 8-bit clean, perhaps other packetization
characteristics of the link).
Then there's all the infrastructure that was built to make this
livable when it was all you could get. If you know I'm user "fmc" at
node "west", and you're "rhudson" at "cnonline", how do you get here
from there? Well, maybe you know which hosts talk to which hosts
between here and there and can construct a bang-path for the route,
but you probably don't. This is where the UUCP Map Project and
pathalias fit in: hosts would publish uucp map entries, these map
entries would get collected into regional maps by the UUCP Map
Coordinator for that region, and the regional maps would get posted to
comp.mail.maps every so often. Interested nodes would take a feed of
this group and feed the articles to pathalias, which would work out a
database of how to get there from here. This would allow you to
address your mail to west!fmc, and the mail software at your end would
consult the database to figure out the best way to route the mail to
west, and construct a !-path from that.
When that Internet thing and the domain name system caught on, it
became possible to set up a domain with a mail exchanger that would
know to queue received mail for that domain as uucp jobs. That is how
mail to reanimators.org works: it goes to one of my uucp upstreams and
I poll them every hour or so to get e-mail. This removed a lot of the
need for uucp maps and pathalias, and the maps generally fell into
disuse (most folks didn't bother to delete their map entries when they
moved on from uucp connections to IP connections) so the UUCP Map
Project shut down about two years ago.
-Frank McConnell ...!daver!west!fmc
Received on Sat Feb 09 2002 - 20:04:34 GMT