16 Jun
2001
16 Jun
'01
12:15 p.m.
On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Eric Dittman wrote:
It sounds like VUNIC/VUnet will need to implement a
central name
registration service as one of its first tasks :-)
Might I suggest that as part of this name registration database, people
also record their ICBM coordinates. This way, not only can we define a
logical structure for the UUCP network, but we can project it onto a
physical map as well.
Yup... this was done on the old UUCP maps as well.
Another big question which arises is what will the topology of the network
be like? At least as far as TCP/IP connected nodes are concerned. Back in
the original days of UUCP, this was significantly influenced by the costs
of local and toll phone charges. You'd want to minimize the phone service
costs by connecting to the least expensive site for your UUCP feed.
We need regional hub like systems with TCP/IP and dial-up connectivity
to route the traffic over the internet to save $$$.
With TCP/IP internet access, it now becomes equally cheap to connect to
any other TCP/IP based VUNIC site. So which path do you choose? Or does
that even matter? I first got onto the net in 1989. UUCP was still in
wide use, but by the time I got fairly sophisticated in my net knowledge,
TCP/IP had almost completely displaced UUCP as a means for pushing data
around.
I think we need to revisit the use of the old map making utilities
which routed
pechter(a)i4got.uucp to ihnp4!decvax!pyramid!pyred!pyrnj!pyrite!pechter.
Types of information which I think would be useful to record for each node
would include things like the following:
* Unique site name
* Unique site ID#
* ID(s) of sites upstream to which you can connect.
* Latitude/longitude coordinates
* Whether the node supports TCP/IP connectivity and at what speed.
* Dialup phone number(s) by which the site is accessible.
(Maybe broken down into subfields which include country access code,
region code, and then the phone number).
* (Packet radio specific information?)
With some of this information, it should be possible to dynamically
structure the maps in such a way that the highest speed TCP/IP based sites
can form a "backbone" for traffic.
Okay, so it's maybe overkill for how our traffic would be taxing things :-)
Hey, isn't UUCP considered peer-to-peer networking?
Nope... it's all necessary and Peter Honeyman, I think, did all the
utilities we need... Just got to web search up and rebuild them.
I used to have a full map set in place on a machine with 3mb of memory
and 80mb of disk. Took a couple of hours to generate the map
which looked something like this in text form.
(Anyone remember the name for the map programs to generate this stuff...
I'm embarrased to say I forgot the names and stuff.)
i4got: decvax!pyred!pyrnj!pyrite!i4got
Sure is peer-to-peer. Supports email, remote printing, remote job
execution, file transfer... pretty slick for stuff that did it all over
RS232 and often slow modems.
-brian.
Bill
---
Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a
villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org