USENIX Board Studies UUCP

Tom Limoncelli limonce at pilot.njin.net
Tue Nov 21 17:10:36 AEST 1989


Two things:

1 -- I agree that a link-layer should be developed.  i.e. split the
bandwidth between different channels.  On one channel, be xmitting news
(or mail, etc.).  On another channel be xmitting control packets
(ihave/sendme, whatever).  Another channel for playing nethack :-)
	-- this could be done with SLIP or dNet (by Matt Dillion)
	   dNet hasn't been implemented on anything but Unix and
AmigaDOS; MS-DOS and non-multitasking OSs would be a non-trivial port.
	-- Would NNTP over SLIP be good or could something more
optimal be devised?  (That is, NNTP used for full transport, not just
for reading news like it's used at some sites).
	-- I am not 100% versed in NNTP, but I don't think it does any
compression.  It would be interesting to compress on the packet level,
or have NNTP send compressed mail.

(Quick tangent: COMPRESSing a UUENCODED files isn't as good as
COMPRESSing the UUDECODED file...  does anyone think it'd be worth it
for a special COMPRESS that would detect a line of UUENCODED data, and
compress it using a different algorithm?  Maybe even decoding it,
compressing it, but marking it for the other side to re-encode it;
doing this on just for each line might be a non-trivial programming
task.  Any comments?)


2 -- It would be really nice to see configuring and maintenance
automated.  A nice (semi-flashy) curses-based program that asks you
questions and outputs configuration files and a nice configuration editor.
I am in the process of setting up UUCP on a VMS system (DECUS UUCP,
nice UUCP clone for VAX/VMS, BTW) and I worry about how well it will
be maintained after I graduate.

Just thoughts, no flames please; serious comments will be well-received.
-Tom
-- 
Tom Limoncelli    -- limonce at pilot.njin.net        Standard Disclaimer
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