🚀 go-pugleaf

david@ukma.ms.uky.csnet (David Herron, NPR Lover) writes:
> 
> Now, when decwrl gets your message it has two choices of how to
> route your message ... one is the MX record which sun is maintaining
> for you (which causes the routing over the internet), and the other
> is the uucp route.
> 
> It's possible their sendmail configuration does not allow them to
> take those two choices into consideration.

    I happen to quite like smail. David and Phil have pointed out a special
case of a problem that smail does not address. The problem is that given
an address (NOT a uucp-style explicit routing path) the address must
be resolved into TWO things: a route and a *transport mechanism*. Right
now, if you don't run sendmail, you are stuck. sendmail's way of
resolving this problem with psuedo-domains (.ether, .tcp, .csnet, .uux, etc)
is bogus, and quite frankly, still a mystery to me (we run sysV). Really
what I need is a table that associates a domain to my prefered transport
mechanism (ie resolve the physical network to be used), then does the routing 
lookup inside the associated connection graph for that physical network.
That way, if a site or gateway is a member of more than one physical
network, it can have a priority scheme of how to send things. 

    I like the trend towards domaining very much, but due to its ARPA
origins in a homogenous physical network, the difficulties of a
multi-connection site were not fully resolved. smail simply reflects
this fact, but in a uucp enviroment instead.

PS: Any arpa sites with x.25 out there?

-----------------------
Eric Carroll
Unicus Corporation, 
Toronto Ont.
{utzoo!utcs!yetti, seiemo!mnetor}!unicus!emc
maybe soon: emc@unicus.com (Any ARPA sites with x.25 out there?)