🚀 go-pugleaf

lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear):
   >Re optimizing vs. correctness:
   >Bounced messages are good incentives for updated map entries.

chip@ateng.com writes:
   Dead pets are good incentives for fenced yards.  This fact does not give me
   the right to run down your pet intentionally.
   Rabid rerouters litter the airwaves with road kills.

I must admit, that's an awfully good analogy.

However, I think I can extend it one step further:

The road being used is not merely a residential two-laner.  It's an
airport runway, with aircraft moving through at appropriate speeds.
Your pet (named Fido, appropriately enough) doesn't stand a snowball's
chance against the landing gear of a 767 landing at 120mph.  Fencing
your adjacent yard becomes a darn good idea.

This is to say, I believe in Internet.  There's no standard which
requires me to leave a !-path intact, so (to echo one of the recurring
themes, I guess) it looks like a religious argument to me.  If you
take it out of the Internet, leave it out of the Internet.

Take a look at it from each side:
[a] UUCP road kill against rabid rerouter: If you would respect my
carefully constructed !-path, it would deliver just fine...and it
WORKED before you mucked with it.
[b] Rabid rerouter against UUCP road kill: If you would not try to use
Internet FQDN host addressing in !-paths, or at least leave things out
of the Internet once they've left it, you wouldn't have to worry about
mail loops...and it WORKED before you mucked with such dangerous,
unpredictable options at intermediate sites you don't control.

The arguments go both ways.  I favor [b].

On the plus side of this argument, I heard from David Dodell
<ddodell@stjhmc.fidonet.org>, asking if I was having trouble with
fidonet.org; I guess he'd heard about the argument but wasn't
sure/aware of the details.  Anyhow, I asked him how much trouble it
would be to set up a set of regional MX's, say 10 of them around the
country.  I've offered to be both one of the MX hosts as well as to
run the nameserver for him.  If fidonet.org is fully interconnected,
then the problem should be solvable without needing an MX per
fido-host, but instead using one MX per region with the FIDONet sites
taking care of the remaining routing issues internally once the
regional matter was solved.

I don't know if anything will come of it, but at least I'm giving it a
shot.  I'm not inclined merely to moan about a situation I don't like;
I'd rather solve it in a palatable way.

--Karl