🚀 go-pugleaf

dave@imax.imax.com (Dave Martindale) writes:

> In article <1992Feb05.164740.10640@revcan.RCT.CA> dave@revcan.RCT.CA (David B
> >However, I still have a problem with the two solutions - don't publish
> >the connection or mark it as terminal.  If we all do that then either
> >uunet becomes useful only for sending mail to other uunet customers, or
> >everyone is forced to become a uunet customer and the entire uucpnet
> >collapses.  In fact, it will break down into two networks - one for
> >those with the volume or the bucks to justify uunet connectivity, and
> >one for those without, with no one willing to foot the bill for the two
> >networks to talk to each other.
> 
> It's not that bad.  I have about 10 uucp connections, only one of which
> is marked "terminal".  You can still route stuff through "imax" using
> any of the links that were in place before uunet.ca existed.  No
> connectivity has been lost, at least at this site, when the uunet.ca
> connection was established.

I speak from complete ignorance, as one who forwards almost all my mail
to a smarthost who then figures out how to route it, but maybe someone
can explain where my thinking goes wrong:

    Why not publish connections to uunet.ca with a rather high
    "cost" associated with them (i.e. tell the software the truth),
    so that mail will preferentially get routed by other means, but
    the high-cost route gets chosen when the alternative becomes
    ridiculously long and complicated?

Of course, for this to work properly, everyone would have to
cooperate and use a similar encoding for uunet.ca connections.
Also, one might want others to use an algorithm something like
"use this connection if the mail is for me, because I want high
performance, but use it for third-party mail only as a last resort".
Is this what marking a connection as terminal means?  If so, perhaps
the weighting factor for terminal needs to be reduced to make it
work properly.

I suppose that for every message I send, no matter what the routing,
somebody, somewhere is picking up the tab for a long-distance call
or whatever.  The current method really is not fair to those sites.
Is there a way of accounting for this?  Or would the accounting cost
more than the service which is provided?

I guess uucp is a cooperative effort, but nodes like mine are not
really helping in the cooperation, since I only connect to one other
node (so far - I'm sure I would be willing to help if anyone needed it).

Any comments?