Bogus .UUCP addresses under SCO

[Alan H. Mintz]

In article <1990Sep30.220547.7205 at mthvax.cs.miami.edu>, wb8foz at mthvax.cs.miami.edu (David Lesher) writes:
> I recently exchanged mail with a user down under about his bogus
> .UUCP suffix, instead of the correct .oz.au that he showed in
> his .sig files.
> 
> He told me that SCO had shipped only them only binaries for
> bnews, with the .UUCP hardcoded into it.
> 
> 1) Why would SCO ship brain_damaged binaries such as this?

I don't know about _brain-damaged_. Not everyone has a registered
domain address. Such sites are usually distinguished by the .UUCP suffix,
which is known to be bogus. SCO provides a service to people without
access to a developement system by shipping a compiled Bnews distribution.

Documentation regarding the configuration used to compile it is sparse, but
I suppose it wouldn't mean much to those requesting it anyway. Exploring
around in the binaries let me patch mine to change the uucp suffix to com.

In poking around just now, I discovered that, if there is a file named
"localdomain" in your /usr/lib/news directory, Bnews will create your
system name by appending whatever is in the "localdomain" file to the
end of the system name as contained in /etc/systemid. Since /etc/systemid
appears in the text portion of the binaries, I suppose that you could patch
it to look elsewhere for the system name as well.

> 2) I thought it was 'rn' that had the .UUCP hardcode bug. Does
> bnews also?

The above seems to apply to all the bnews stuff (UUCP can be found in
most of the binaries.). You can patch them to .COM (or whatever) if appropriate,
or use the "localdomain" file method.

> comments/flames/free_beer?

Yes. No. YES!!!!
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