What is "The Internet" TCP/IP or UNIX-to-UNIX ?

Sun Apr 4 21:56:41 UTC 2010

On 4/4/2010 12:18, Steven Bellovin wrote:
> On Apr 4, 2010, at 3:08 16PM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
>
>   
>>> File transfer wasn't multihop
>>>       
>> It was, for at least some versions (V2 and later?), if the intermediate site(s) allowed execution of the uucp command. 25 years on the brain is fuzzy on the details ...
>>     
>
> You could certainly add uux and uux to the list of legal remote commands, but I confess that my memory is also dim about whether
>
> 	uucp file a!b!c
>
> would be translated automatically.  It has indeed been a while...
>   
Heh this brings back some memories.  uucp/uux for email and news.  I
remember writing shells scripts that would pull the UUCP maps out of the
UseNet newsgroup (comp.mail.maps IIRC) and run "pathalias" on it to
generate email bang path routes to all other mapped UUCP sites from
yours so that you could use domain-style email addresses instead of
remembering the paths! 

So then you could address an email to "user at uucpsite.uucp" and Sendmail
or Smail (I ran Smail) would look it up in the pathalias generated
databse and convert it to a bang path.  :)

I also remember a few key "dual-connected" sites which were both on the
UUCP network and the internet were used as gateways into the
internet/DNS/SMTP email world.  Specifically I remember "psuvax" being a
widely used, and abused site for this, which eventually shut down that
service because too many people were using them as a UUCP/internet
gateway for email, sucking up all their cycles and bandwidth!

-Jim