🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <319@umbio.MIAMI.EDU> ludey@umbio.MIAMI.EDU (Lanny Udey) writes:
>We have several people here who need to mail to people on the JANET
>network. They have received various routings via UUCP, BITNET and the
>Internet but none seem to work consistantly for all sites.
>
>Is there a major gateway site off the Internet or a routing that you
>have found to be consistant?

There are three distinct gateways from the US into JANET - one for each
of the main networks you mention. I'll describe each in turn.

[1] INTERNET

	The JANET/Internet gateway is currently at University College
London. It permits telnet and mail traffic to authorised users only. If
either the sender or recipient of the mail message is not authorised,
UCL won't forward the mail and they might not even return it with an
explanatory message to you.
	Access to this gateway is restricted for reasons of cost and
capacity. A new gateway is supposed to be installed "soon". This will be
based at ULCC (University of London Computer Centre) and is supposed to
provide free and unrestricted access for JANET users to the full range
of Internet services.
	I understand that UCL have entered JANET domain names as MX
records with the NIC. If your mail system is on the Internet and
understands MX records, then mailing user@somesite.ac.uk will work if
the user is registered with UCL. [The MX records point at the ARPA side
of the UCL gateway.] Percent-style routing also works - i.e.
user%somesite.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa - though this shouldn't be necessary on
the Internet these days.

[2] UUCP

	The University of Kent - UKC provide the UK's UUCP gateway. They
too have restrictions on passing mail. The UUCP network costs real money
and UKC recoup their costs from sites who register with them. For
unregistered sites, UKC say that they will silently throw the mail away
- sending it back costs them money. In practice, they let the mail
through, but this will stop if the costs escalate.
	A bang-style path to a site somewhere in the UK would begin
 ....!uunet!mcvax!ukc!UKsite!user. If this site was registered with UKC,
it should appear in the UUCP maps and would be pathaliased to
user@UKsite.uucp. UKC can also accept domain names, so an address like
uunet!mcvax!ukc!uk.ac.somesite!user would be OK, as would
uunet!mcvax!ukc!somesite.ac.uk!user.

[3] BITNET

	The JANET/Bitnet gateway is at Rutherford Laboratories. It is
supported by IBM and is totally free until the end of the year when IBM
will review their funding. In Bitnet terms, this gateway is called
UKACRL. It uses percent-style routing, so an address like
user%uk.ac.somesite@UKACRL.BITNET should work.
	However, the BITNET gateway is not very clever - it can't do
things a UK gateway has to do (like flip domains around - more on this
later).


ADDRESSING FORMATS

	JANET uses a mail protocol that's more or less identical to the
Internet standard RFC822. The important difference is in domain
ordering. JANET puts the biggest domain at the left, the rest of the
world puts it on the right! In JANET terms, my address is
jim@uk.ac.strath.cs but for everywhere else it's jim@cs.strath.ac.uk !

	Now the gateways at UKC and UCL are super-smart. They can flip
domains around, handle partially qualified domain names and cope with
mixed format addressing such as a!b@c. Provided your mail has something
reasonable as an address, UCL and UKC will do the right thing with it.
Both the UKC and UCL mail systems manage to hide the stupidity of JANET
domain ordering from the rest of the world.

	On the other hand, the Bitnet gateway can't do any of that. They
can only get by with full JANET names in JANET ordering in either the
long or short form of JANET names. i.e.

	user%UK.AC.SOMESITE@UKACRL.BITNET
or	user%UK.AC.SOMESITE-UNIVERSITY@UKACRL.BITNET

should work. Anything else probably won't. If you want to use the BITNET
gateway to get mail into JANET, you must ensure that UKACRL is presented
with a mail address as outlined above. If not, the mail probably won't
be understood by the gateway.

	From personal experience, I've never had trouble with the UCL or
UKC mail systems. The sheer volume of mail they deal with means that
they have to get it right and be tolerant of mail protocol violations.
I have never been able to send mail into BITNET via the gateway and get
a reply through the same gateway.

I hope this is useful.

		Jim
-- 
ARPA:	jim%cs.strath.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa, jim@cs.strath.ac.uk
UUCP:	jim@strath-cs.uucp, ...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!jim
JANET:	jim@uk.ac.strath.cs

"JANET domain ordering is swapped around so's there'd be some use for rev(1)!"