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

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1

What if TCP is removed ? and IP is completely re-worked in the same
160-bit foot-print as IPv4 ? Would 64-bit Addressing last a few years ?

IPv6 is a loser because everyone has to carry the overhead of bloated
packets. It is a one-size-fits-all take it or leave it solution.

By that logic, wouldn't IPv4 also be considered a loser because everyone
has been carrying the overhead of bloated packets for years? Especially
near the beginning, we didn't need a 32-bit-sized address ...

And why would we jump to 64-bit addressing, since you're so worried about
the bloat in packets? Wouldn't it be more sensible to move to 36-bit or
40-bit addresses? If we jump to 64, aren't we wasting at least 56 bits
per packet then (2 * (64 - 36))?

And if we're going to completely re-work IP, why wouldn't we just move to
a version that ensures addresses are plentiful? And if we're going to do
that, why not just go with 128 bits?

Bits are cheap. I mean, really, really, really, REALLY cheap. Trading
a few bytes worth in order to get a solution that'll last us for the rest
of our lifetimes (and then some) is a no-brainer.

However, if you're really interested in it, I suggest you read the message
I posted, subject of "Important", a few days ago. It suggests a
bloat-free way to continue to grow the existing network. It's completely
practical and I think you should promote it.

... JG

2

I must have dozed off--what is the connection between the Subject: and
the recent traffic under it.

"The Internet" (Note caps) is the (I'd like to say "web" but that will
be misunderstood--current usage is actually correct, but bigger than
porn and such) of connections between networks. Its connection layer is
IP, other protocols such as UDP and IP (AND OTHERS) "ride" on IP, which
in turn rides on one or more layers of facility-relevant transport
protocols.

UUCP is not a descriptor of any kind of a network in any engineering
sense that I know of. It is a point-to-point communications protocol.
Other protocols, including network protocols (NNTP, SMTP) used in
networking as a sociologist might use the term.

3

UUCP is not a descriptor of any kind of a network in any engineering
sense that I know of. It is a point-to-point communications protocol.

You should revise some of the history behind it. It was a descriptor
for a very large network, it was even a TLD in the mid eighties when
the transition to DNS was taking place, the old bang style addresses
like mine original seismo!atina!pete transitioned for a while to
pete@atina.UUCP and later to pete@atina.ar.

UUCP was not just a point to point protocol. Originally it was a set
of utility programs to permit copying files between Unix systems (Unix
to Unix CoPy, hence the name), since electronic emails where
essentially files UUCP became the transport mechanism for both
electronic email and later Usenet News.

Some referred to UUCP as Unix to Unix Communications Protocol, not
quite right but yes one of the pieces of UUCP (uucico = Unix to Unix
Copy in Copy Out) implemented different type of communication
protocols negotiated during the initial handshake phase and fine
tuned to different communication facilities, point to point, telephone
modems, specific modems such as Telebit Trailblazers with PEP,
different types of encapsulation using X.28, X25, and obviously
TCP/IP.

For several years until we've got a more decent telecommunications
infrastructure UUCP was all we had in Argentina to let the academic
and science community reach out and communicate with their colleagues
around the world, we had an adapted version of the UUCP implementation
for DOS (some called it UUPC) that became very popular and enabled our
"UUCP network" to reach over 800 nodes in the early 90's when we later
were able to get a direct (IP) connection to the rest of the world.

My .02

Cheers
Jorge

4

You should revise some of the history behind it. It was a descriptor
for a very large network, it was even a TLD in the mid eighties when
the transition to DNS was taking place, the old bang style addresses
like mine original seismo!atina!pete transitioned for a while to
pete@atina.UUCP and later to pete@atina.ar.

i don't recall .uucp making it into the actual DNS, but i remember our mail
system used it as a trigger to do a uucp-maps lookup.

For several years until we've got a more decent telecommunications
infrastructure UUCP was all we had in Argentina to let the academic
and science community reach out and communicate with their colleagues
around the world, we had an adapted version of the UUCP implementation
for DOS (some called it UUPC) that became very popular and enabled our
"UUCP network" to reach over 800 nodes in the early 90's when we later
were able to get a direct (IP) connection to the rest of the world.

uucp introduced a far-flung group of hosts, academic and otherwise, to things
that were popular on the internet, namely email and USENET.

i'm sure its an open debate as to if being in the UUCP maps also meant that
you were "on the Internet", but many people seemed or seem to think this way.

i recall seeing uucp going into not only south america, but the caribbean,
south pacific and many other regions, much the same way that you describe it.

there were several organizations who were quite dedicated to using uucp over
(dialup/X.25/carrier-pigeon) in order to extend email and USENET deep into
the third world.

5

UUCP is not a descriptor of any kind of a network in any engineering
sense that I know of. It is a point-to-point communications protocol.

You should revise some of the history behind it. It was a descriptor
for a very large network, it was even a TLD in the mid eighties when
the transition to DNS was taking place, the old bang style addresses
like mine original seismo!atina!pete transitioned for a while to
pete@atina.UUCP and later to pete@atina.ar.

I agree with some of this and most of the following, but I think the
problem is not so much my history as it is the drift in definitions.

And I do not pretend to any special authority in the area.

But when I think of "network" I think of things like the PSTN, ABC,
Mutual, California's DOJ torn-tape TTY, and FIDO where the message to be
delivered was the focus and the internal works were pretty much
uninteresting to the "user".

UUCP was not just a point to point protocol. Originally it was a set
of utility programs to permit copying files between Unix systems (Unix
to Unix CoPy, hence the name), since electronic emails where
essentially files UUCP became the transport mechanism for both
electronic email and later Usenet News.

CoPy is the only decode that ever occurs to me. And the file view of
the world is correct and I had forgotten it.

Some referred to UUCP as Unix to Unix Communications Protocol, not
quite right but yes one of the pieces of UUCP (uucico = Unix to Unix
Copy in Copy Out) implemented different type of communication
protocols negotiated during the initial handshake phase and fine
tuned to different communication facilities, point to point, telephone
modems, specific modems such as Telebit Trailblazers with PEP,
different types of encapsulation using X.28, X25, and obviously
TCP/IP.

For several years until we've got a more decent telecommunications
infrastructure UUCP was all we had in Argentina to let the academic
and science community reach out and communicate with their colleagues
around the world, we had an adapted version of the UUCP implementation
for DOS (some called it UUPC) that became very popular and enabled our
"UUCP network" to reach over 800 nodes in the early 90's when we later
were able to get a direct (IP) connection to the rest of the world.

My .02

Mine is that while "UUCP" took on a networkish patina in recent years (I
know a place here in town that still uses it, or did when I last had
contact with them a few years ago).

But in it origins, UUCP was no more a network function that "cp" is
today. (Hmmm....interesting digression. Was there NFS before there was
IP? Seems like it, but I don't remember how it worked.)

With UUCP you had to dial somebody up, say howdy (sometimes human to
human) and issue the copy command. Sure enough, frequent users had cron
jobs and scripts to do all that. And sure enough, co-operative sites
would strip their own names off the beginning of a bang path and pass
the file to the next in line, the next time they talked to them. Which
might be anywhere from a few seconds to never from now.

6

You should revise some of the history behind it. It was a descriptor
for a very large network, it was even a TLD in the mid eighties when
the transition to DNS was taking place, the old bang style addresses
like mine original seismo!atina!pete transitioned for a while to
pete@atina.UUCP and later to pete@atina.ar.

i don't recall .uucp making it into the actual DNS, but i remember our mail
system used it as a trigger to do a uucp-maps lookup.

I thought it was a sendmail hack, along with .bitnet and others.

i'm sure its an open debate as to if being in the UUCP maps also meant that
you were "on the Internet", but many people seemed or seem to think this way.

My problem is that the UUCP maps (and the host-host communications)
existed before, during and apart from anything properly labeled "The
Internet".

That the UUCP world developed links to "The Internet" (and FIDONet, and
BITNET and ....) goes without saying. But landing you Piper Cherokee at
LAX doesn't make you part of the Commercial Airline Industry.

7

There were two primary user-issued commands, uucp and uux (remote execution). You'd say something like

  uucp file... site!file
  uucp site!file... file
  uux site!command [site!file...]
  uux command site!file...

The paths you could write to or retrieve from, as well as the list of commands that could be executed remotely, were set in a configuration file. The former was typically restricted much as anon-ftp is; the latter was typically rmail and -- after about 1982 -- rnews for Usenet. There was very little, if any, manual dialing; you typically either had an autodialer or you were polled by someone who did. Calling frequency and legal times of day for calling were also configurable, though polling -- and only polling -- was typically done via cron. The receiving site did not strip its name off the email path, the sending site did. That is, if I typed

  mail foo!bar!bletch!user

my mailer would translate that to

  uux foo!rmail bar!bletch!user

Site foo, in turn, would execute

  uux bar!rmail bletch!user

etc. File transfer wasn't multihop, nor was remote execution per se. Usenet used a flooding algorithm with duplicate suppression.

Uucp was designed for autodial modems, originally controlled by Bell autodialers; on PDP-11s, you needed a DN-11 to control the dialer. The dialer was hooked to a modem -- a real one, with no telephone or dial attached to it; the modem was also hooked to a serial path. Even very early on, though, uucp operated over higher-speed devices, such as the Bell Labs Datakit Virtual Circuit Switch and the ARPANET.

Figuring the explicit mail routing path was annoying. I wrote (and Peter Honeyman rewrote) a command called pathalias; it took topology and cost data and generated the optimum path. Since cost had to reflect monetary cost, reliability, and policy -- not everyone would forward for everyone else -- people had to tweak the metric to get the effect they desired. (That, at least, should sound vaguely on-topic for NANOG...) But the visibility of the path was the only thing ordinary users had to worry about.

    --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

8

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 ...

--lyndon

9

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...

    --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

10

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...

I'm pretty sure it was adding 'uucp' in the commands list that enabled the behaviour. HDB might have used a different config file syntax for turning this on. I would have to dig out the source code to remember the details. The command syntax you show above worked -- UUCP handled the re-queueing internally.

--lyndon

11

i don't recall .uucp making it into the actual DNS, but i remember our mail
system used it as a trigger to do a uucp-maps lookup.

It was for a brief period of time as a pseudo-domain and placeholder
for MX RRs for machines participating in the UUCP project.

Mary Ann Horton (formerly Mark Horton) was in charge of the UUCP zone.

uucp introduced a far-flung group of hosts, academic and otherwise, to things
that were popular on the internet, namely email and USENET.

Once upon a time there were not Internet and connection to ARPAnet was
restricted, which triggered into existence CSNET, BITNET, etc, etc.)
and for many, particularly developing countries or small institutions,
could not afford to pay for a permanent connection sort of a DDS 56K.
BTW in Argentina we didn't have even digital lines, just nasty copper
between some places.

i'm sure its an open debate as to if being in the UUCP maps also meant that
you were "on the Internet", but many people seemed or seem to think this way.

At some time there was some sort of confusion everywhere, and also
turf battles between different "networks", CSNET vs BTINET, etc, but
people one way or another got connected and that was the goal those
days to get as many people as possible connected via some network and
at minimum be able to have electronic email. There were some popular
sites that ran services such as ftp via email, archie via email, etc.

i recall seeing uucp going into not only south america, but the caribbean,
south pacific and many other regions, much the same way that you describe it.

Many of the developing countries did their first step that way.

there were several organizations who were quite dedicated to using uucp over
(dialup/X.25/carrier-pigeon) in order to extend email and USENET deep into
the third world.

Yes we used what we had at hand, Rick Adams originally at SEISMO and
later at UUNET, Randy Bush, the folks at Pyramid, and many others
helped a lot to get people on board.

Very interesting days :-), while visiting Glenn Ricart (SURAnet) at
UMD I remember giving sort of a lecture about UUCP and the tricks we
used to get connected to his undergrad students.

Cheers
Jorge

12

But when I think of "network" I think of things like the PSTN, ABC,
Mutual, California's DOJ torn-tape TTY, and FIDO where the message to be
delivered was the focus and the internal works were pretty much
uninteresting to the "user".

Read "Notable Computer Networks, John Quarterman and Josiah Hoskins,
CACM Vol 29, No 10, Oct 1986", UUCP was considered one of the
"Cooperative Networks".

UUCP was not just a point to point protocol. Originally it was a set
of utility programs to permit copying files between Unix systems (Unix
to Unix CoPy, hence the name), since electronic emails where
essentially files UUCP became the transport mechanism for both
electronic email and later Usenet News.

CoPy is the only decode that ever occurs to me. And the file view of
the world is correct and I had forgotten it.

Steven Bellovin can give you more details, there are several papers
and he wrote one with Peter Honeyman who is the guy that rewrote the
original version of the UUCP utilities developed by Mike Lesk at AT&T.

Mine is that while "UUCP" took on a networkish patina in recent years (I
know a place here in town that still uses it, or did when I last had
contact with them a few years ago).

I know some that still use it.

With UUCP you had to dial somebody up, say howdy (sometimes human to
human) and issue the copy command. Sure enough, frequent users had cron
jobs and scripts to do all that. And sure enough, co-operative sites
would strip their own names off the beginning of a bang path and pass
the file to the next in line, the next time they talked to them. Which
might be anywhere from a few seconds to never from now.

Read RFC976 for additional details.

Cheers Jorge.

13

That the UUCP world developed links to "The Internet" (and FIDONet, and
BITNET and ....) goes without saying. But landing you Piper Cherokee at
LAX doesn't make you part of the Commercial Airline Industry.

That's how for some time the distinction between "internet" and
"Internet" was born.

Jorge

14

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...

Yup. The real work was done by uucico (using an x.21 type protocol
implemented by Greg Chesson of EGREG fame if I remember correctly).
UUCP and friends where front-ends for it and has been reimplemnted
as the honeydanber version. Then there were the AT&T Basic Network
Utilities version, Taylor uucp, the EUUG version etc. of these.

  jaap

15

This is an example of the law that the number of replys is directly
propotional to the cluelessness of the post?

Bruce

16

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@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. :slight_smile:

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

17

the visibility of the path was the only thing ordinary users had to
worry about.

you forgot, "and thus sigs were born." they once served a purpose other
than ego

randy

18

fwiw, i still run uucp for a very few remaining odd sites.

randy

19

Right, of course -- they had to show the uucp path from a well-known node.

    --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

20

I remember trying to debug a very messy mail routing problem some 25 years ago,
which we finally traced back to the fact that pathalias was too smart by half,
and some sites were too helpful. My user was trying to send mail to a path
'fluffybunny!whiterabbit!jellybean' or some such - but when the mail left
Bitnet via a different gateway than it was expected, the gateway chose the
closest fluffybunny to send it to - and when *that* machine forwarded to
whiterabbit, and whiterabbit couldn't find jellybean in its UUCP tables, we
were most mystified that the bounce messages came back with European timestamps
for a box supposedly in the midwest US.

There was much kicking of metal trash cans when I finally figured out what
happened. :wink: