Text 21880, 76 rader
Skriven 2011-08-22 11:59:37 av mark lewis (1:3634/12.0)
  Kommentar till text 21647 av Janis Kracht (1:261/38)
Ärende: FidoNews 28:32 [06/09]: Question Of The Week
====================================================
> That sounds a bit complicated.  I thought the addresses were supposed
> to "just work" whereby if someone emailed the Internet mail address 
> it was gated to netmail.

 JK> There was a time when they did, because we had "one" system that
 JK> dealt with gateing mail to uucp.

yes, that is how it was back in the day...

[TRIM]

 JK> The correct RFC822 address for a FidoNet power user at point
 JK> zo:ne/no.po is user@Ppo.Fno.Nne.Zzo.FIDONET.ORG.  For example,

 JK>     randy.bush@p0.f42.n105.z1.fidonet.org

and this format is still valid... however (!!!) with today's world, there are
numerous gateways... they may or may not be official gateways, though... to be
official, they have to meet certain standards and they have to be part of the
fidonet.org domain... other gateways have their own domain and basically
fidonet is a subdomain under them... for example the following two are the
same...

    randy.bush@p0.f42.n105.z1.fidonet.org
    randy.bush@p0.f42.n105.z1.ftn.wpusa.dynip.com

the first one would enter fidonet via one of the official fidonet.org mail
systems... the second one would enter fidonet via a private domain that is
providing gating services... once in fidonet, the netmail would follow whatever
paths necessary to reach the user at the destination fidonet system...

the UUCP flag in the nodelist is used to denote official gateways... there are
also the user flags in the nodelist... these flags can denote what the sysop of
that systems wants... user flags in the nodelist are NOT official flags and
should be accepted as they are without any filtering... with this in mind,
browsing thru the nodelist, one might see entries similar to the following...

     ,2,gateway1,NC_USA,UUCP,1-919-774-5930,33600,XA,V34,CM,UUCP
  ,3,gateway2,NC_USA,UUCP,1-919-774-5930,33600,XA,V34,CM,U,UUCP

the first one would indicate an official gateway because of the official UUCP
nodelist flag... the second one looks the same... except... note the U flag all
by itself... it indicates that all flags following are USER flags... so the
UUCP in the second entry is a user flagged unofficial gateway...

i had to shorten the above /example/ listings to avoid wordwrap confusion... 
[TRIM]

 JK> So, what one would do is check in your region for a UUCP gateway (I
 JK> believe your RC is one, Gary) and ask him to set up an MX record
 JK> for your node.  Then you can use that gateway.

here's where some of the stickiness comes from with regard to official and
unofficial gateways... the official gateways have the ability to maintain MX
records in the DNS for their portion of the domain they manage and this is one
of the requirements of being an official gateway...

some systems, however, use a dynamic DNS provider such that they have a static
domain name and a dynamic IP address from their ISP... these systems cannot
continually update the MX records as their IP changes because of various
reasons... the most important being that the service they use may not provide
such capability... on really bad days, those dynamic IPs may change 30, 40 or
more times... on good days, they may never change and that might last for weeks
or months... so imagine trying to send an email to a system which has an MX
address that is flopping about all the time... another factor is that, like
running one's own DNS server, there must be two of them... one is the main and
the other is secondary... there may be more than two, too... each is accessed
in turn in case the one above is uncontactable for some reason...

i hope this helps some... my system is an unofficial gateway connected via a
dynamic IP with a static domain name... yes, i've danced this dance for years
:)

)\/(ark

 * Origin:  (1:3634/12)