🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <199211120128.AA00604@fnord.wang.com> fitz (Tom Fitzgerald	) writes:
|Please don't direct followups to news.admin.misc.... this is not a new
|administration issue, and the newgroup hasn't reached the far corners of
|the net yet.

I didn't do it explicitly, but I realize now that my news software (trn 2.2)
is somehow *sometimes* automatically selecting the first newsgroup for a
Followup-to.  I have never noticed this before, and I will have to investigate.

I've redirected this to comp.mail.uucp where the rest of this discussion
is occuring.

Sorry for the confusion.

|clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes:

|> uunet	... <{sitename}>({cost})
|> The angle brackets indicate that nothing should be routed *through*
|> "sitename" to other machines.

|> Furthermore, you shouldn't advertise the uunet link in *your* map entry
|> at all.  Otherwise, large numbers of systems may choose you to get to
|> uunet.

|It would be better to advertise the link but make it really expensive.  If
|you don't advertise it, it's not clear if the 1-way path is a mistake, or
|what.  Some map coordinators insist on bidirectional links.  If you declare
|it instead as

|yoursite uunet(52*WEEKLY)

|it makes things a lot clearer, and the mailers will still never choose to
|route through it.

For each link that pathalias parses, it generates a backlink of 100*DEAD.
It also takes the smallest cost that it ever sees for the link.  So,
by leaving it out, you make the highest possible cost, and any setting
*less* than 100*DEAD just makes it more likely to be used.

While DEAD is a pretty high cost, there are quite a few explicitly specified,
so it isn't that unlikely that a sequence of a few DEAD links would
be preferred by pathalias over an implicit 100*DEAD.

Any map maintainer that insists on bidirectional links is mistaken -
the <> should make it clear that there are restrictions on material
going over the link, and that insisting on a backlink is the wrong
thing to do.  Besides, Henry Spencer used to say something to the effect
that "certain wretchedly stupid mailers refuse to understand that
some links are unidirectional" - ie: some links are *inherently*
unidirectional.

|Actually, if a system has no other path to UUNET except through yoursite,
|it will route through you, but this would happen anyway.  If the maps
|declare an a->b link but no b->a link, pathalias will assume there's a link
|with cost DEAD, and use it if there's no other alternative.

|52*WEEKLY is close enough to DEAD to make no difference.

Yeah, but that isn't the point.  You want it bigger than DEAD. 
-- 
Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
Psroff 3.0 info: psroff-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
Ferret list: ferret-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca