🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Oct17.010836.8390@shl.uucp> phil@shl.uucp (Phil Trubey) writes:
>OK you MMDF gurus ... Our site currently does not have a registered 
>domain, so we are using the name 'shl.uucp'.  We have applied for the
>'shl.com' domain.  The application instructions recommend that you make
>your mailer recognise (but not use on outgoing mail) the new domain 
>('shl.com') in anticipation of the application being OKed.
>
>How do I tell MMDF to recognize shl.com and shl.uucp as valid names
>for our machine?

Here we get to one of the more powerful features of MMDF .. playing
tricks with the domain tables ..

Quickie review:  Domain tables are declared with MDMN directives.  They
	always refer to an MTBL directive with the "table=file-name" thing.
	In the MDMN directive you say "dmn=some.dom.ain" to make the
	directive belong to some particular domain.  Entries in the
	referenced table are like so:

name: official-name.some.dom.ain

	the string on the LHS (Left Hand Side) is concatenated with the 
	dmn= value to make the effective domain name.  The name on the 
	RHS (Right Hand Side) is the official name for the domain ..

What I suggest you do, configuration-wise, is so:

;- seperate your .uucp information from the rest of the .uucp information.
;	(into a seperate table)
;- Create two MTBL's for .uucp information, like so:

MTBL	name=duucp-lcl, file=domain/uucp-local, show="SHL UUCP information"
MTBL	name=duucp,	file=domain/uucp,	show="world UUCP information"

;	in domain/uucp-local you'll have an entry:  		shl: shl.uucp
;	in domain/uucp you'll have normal entries like:		ukma: ukma.uucp

;- Create 4 MDMN's like so:

MDMN	COM,	table=duucp-lcl, show="shl.uucp hiding in .com"
MDMN	UUCP,	table=duucp-lcl, show="shl.uucp"
MDMN	COM,	table=dcom,	 show="Normal .com information"
MDMN	UUCP,	table=duucp,	 show="Normal .uucp information"


Note that we're using the same table in two different zones (domains).
It's a mite tricky here .. remember that I said the LHS of the table
was concatenated with the domain of the table for the effective domain?
This means that when you get to the information via the first "MDMN COM"
it's interpred as meaning

	shl.COM:	shl.uucp

And if via the first "MDMN UUCP" it's interpreted as:

	shl.UUCP:	shl.uucp

In both cases the Official Name will be "shl.uucp" .. when your domain
name becomes Official then you should change the RHS to be "shl.com".

Finally, in your local channel table you make sure that entries exist
for all variants of your local host name:

	shl:	shl.uucp
	shl.uucp: shl.uucp
	shl.com: shl.com
		.
		.
		.

Other things to set are:

MLNAME		SHL	; local name within the domain 
MLDOMAIN	UUCP	; local domain name
; MLOCMACHINE		; if any name below mlname.mldomain	


Finallly -- if I've confused you too much I recently noticed over
on louie.udel.edu's anonymous ftp copies of MMDF IIb update 43 sources
**AND** (in a one-time blue-light special just for you SCO/Unix owners..)
the *documents* in a seperate tar file.



>BTW, where did MMDF come from, and is there a good tutorial on it
>somewhere - I am using SCO Unix and it came with it, and true to form
>of any mailer, the documentation is a little skimpy.


It began, like all good stories, in the mists of time ...

Long long ago Dr. Dave Farber got this grant, see, from the US Army
to generate a mailer.  At the time he was at U of Delaware, but he's
since moved over to UPenn.  One of his graduate students was a bright
promising lad named Dave Crocker, Dave got to write the code.  Out
popped MMDF-I (then called MMDF).  I hear it was a Truly Buggy piece
of code ... Various "mailer scientests" (not my term, but peter's)
tried it out to mixed reaction.  It drew upon code from various
other places -- particularly The Rand Corporation.  (Did you know
that the Rand people had their own brand of Unix back in the V{6,7}
days -- one of the features was a flag on open(2) which set
an "exclusive open" mode which could be used for file locking -- that
code still exists in the MMDF distribution as one of the locking
methods available).

Some places where it saw use was:

	US Army -- they still use it to this day, quite heavily.
		   An early site was the Ballistics Research Lab (BRL).
	CSNET	-- it ran (and still does run) CSNET-RELAY
		   (now {relay,relay2,sh,dev,...}.cs.net)
	a lot of CSNET members
	University College of London -- they used it quite heavily
		    as a major mail relay between Britain and
		    the rest of the world.  As a result it has
		    all this code to flip domain names around and
		    heuristics to map domain names in different orders
		    and so on..
	a lot of British universities
	At least one university in the Netherlands

Over the years people have worked on it in their spare time, or sometimes
as major parts of Their Job.  There would always be one, or a few,
Maintainers of the Source .. I (and my office mate) are the current 
Maintainers.  Except that the US Army has their own version, as
does SCO.  The previous Maintainers were/are at CSNET/BBN.  Before
that it was at UCL, BRL, and UDEL.

BTW:  UCL took the basic design & code, recoded large parts of it,
	and created PP from the result.  PP does all the stuff which
	MMDF does, though some things are done in different ways.
	It also does X.400 -- and RFC822<->X.400 gatewaying following
	the RFCs 987, 1148, etc.

BTW: TWG has a derivation from PP called WIN/MHS which does all those things.
	It's among a family of products which do ISO/OSI style networking.

Any historical innacuracies above are because I hadn't even heard of
Unix at the time MMDF was being written.  I come into the MMDF picture
sometime after 4.3BSD was released and MMDF-IIb was Officially Unleashed
upon the world.  It runs the mailer at ms.uky.edu (a.k.a. ukma.{uucp,bitnet}).

Oh yes, version numbering:

MMDF
MMDF-II
MMDF-IIb	(released with 4.3BSD in the user contributed software)
MMDF-III	(an *extremely* unnofficial name for PP :-) )
PP v5.0		(everything prior was alpha/beta/gamma/diga versions..)
WIN/MHS v1	(current release)





>Phil Trubey
>(UUCP: ...!uunet!shl!phil)


-- 
<- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <david@twg.com>
<- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <david@ms.uky.edu>
<-
<- Remember:  On System V it's "tar xovf", not "tar xvf"!