🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Feb3.203951.14005@imax.imax.com> dave@imax.imax.com (Dave Martindale) writes:
>The result of this is that if you publish a connection to uunet.ca
>that is not a "terminal" link, you instantly become one of the
>few routes that sites who are not customers can use to get mail
>to and from uunet.ca.  When our uunet.ca link was first published,
>we declared it as usable by the world, expecting to route a small
>quantity of third-party traffic.  The third-party traffic dwarfed
>the mail originating and terminating on this machine by at least
>a factor of 10!

>And when I protested to some of these people that the link was
>there for casual mail, not heavy traffic, some of the people
>responded politely and redirected their traffic, but others
>said "if you don't want to handle mail, don't publish the link".
>Basically, they wouldn't acknowledge that someone running a mailing
>list, or generating considerable traffic by subscribing to a mailing
>list or requesting archive service, has some responsibility to see
>who is paying for the communications they are using.

While I sympathize with your problem, the latter group of people do have 
a point (aside from being assholes) - do not advertise cheap links to
critical sites unless you're prepared to take on the full load.  The
problem is quite simply that pathalias wasn't designed to factor in volume.
If you advertise a cheap link, why blame individual people for what pathalias
is obviously going to choose?

People do not like being chastised for doing something that pathalias
told them was okay.

Advertising a cheap link to uunet for "casual use" is like drilling an
enormous hole in the bottom of a full bathtub and expecting it to drip out
politely rather than come out with a rather messy whoosh.

Pathalias behaviour is a "law of nature".  Email automatically gravitates
to the cheaper links.  Unfortunately, there's no "back pressure" (automatic
feedback).

I've been fighting with some really wierd routing up here (parts of it
leading to this thread starting in the first place).  I've managed to
keep relatively sane paths by heavily hacking the map database to route
through links that I know about that are *intended* for the traffic
(but for various reasons aren't properly documented, or change too
fast for the maps or pathalias to track).

One of the things that is becoming really obvious, especially in the
somewhat less UUCP dense areas like Ottawa, is that the UUCP network
is becoming somewhat (somewhat?  how about very!) disconnected.  Others
have remarked on this before.  Before hacking, some of my routes
are totally ridiculous.  (at one point we had to go to Toronto and
back to get to Ocunix's Ottawa MX forwarder!)

I'm writing a new version of unpackmaps that will be orders of magnitude
faster than the traditional uuhosts/unpackmaps 3.x mechanisms, *plus*
take into account some of the things I'm learning about path management.
[Anybody want to help me alpha test?  Does anybody have a *small*
PD zcat function (eg: a readable version of the Obfuscated C amazing
20 line zcat?).  I currently have it running at more or less the
unpackmaps/uuhosts functionality but much faster with still room
for improvement.  No documentation yet (of course ;-)]

Some of the things I'm learning are:
    1) find an IP site willing to take on a significant portion
       of your addressing.  Make sure that they really will (ie: by paying
       for it)
    2) set your smart-host to that IP site (provided that they
       know how to do pathalias routing reasonably).
    3) Run only with a set of maps that represent your region.
       I've been having relatively good luck with just the Canadian
       maps.  But Ontario alone might be pretty good too.
       (it has to be big enough to represent a good UUCP link
       population, but not so large that the sheer weight
       of stupid/bogus/assinine links doesn't screw all of your
       routing)

       [Besides, the current maps are sufficiently large to make
       running all them through pathalias to be a very doubtful
       proposition on a 3b1]
    4) Short-circuit all paths leading to FQDNs or domains
       to go directly to your smart-host.  (which ain't perfect,
       but it works reasonably well)
    5) Get a domain name and *use* it.
    6) Send mail via domain names.

[Some of the above will be implemented as options in the new
unpackmaps]

In short, to maintain reliable email in the future, each of us is
going to have to enroll in a uunet or ONET or something.  Or, have
a sugar-daddy who'll let you piggy-back.

Ottawa.Elegant.Com (aka ferret.ocunix.on.ca) is a direct
(terminal) UUCP link to uunet.ca.  I've been quite impressed with
how fast email travels when I use uunet.ca.  Some conversations
almost become real-time.  Try it, you'll like it.  And my unpackmaps
is being extended to make connections to servers such as uunet.ca
particularly easy to handle.

I do quite a bit of traffic from here, with the ferret mailing list
and so on.  Bounces are very rare, and they're usually due to the
mail I'm replying to having bogus From: lines.  Or uucp-only sites
without domain names a long way away.

I've also experimented with hacking on smail to implement some
sorts of policy decisions for mail.  One of them, which isn't
*that* hard to implement is size accounting for originating users.
And file truncation ;->
-- 
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