From: CRDGW2::CRDGW2::MRGATE::"SMTP::FALCON::TNIELAND" 18-JUL-1989 08:28 To: MRGATE::"ARISIA::EVERHART" Subj: L&T/VAX SIG Tape Reviews: Part 2 -- DECUS UUCP Message-Id: <8907181210.AA06189@crdgw1.ge.com> Received: from AAMRL.AF.MIL by DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU; Tue, 18 Jul 89 08:04 EDT Received: from FALCON by AAMRL.AF.MIL; Tue, 18 Jul 89 08:00 EDT Date: Tue, 18 Jul 89 08:03 EST From: Ted Nieland <@AAMRL.AF.MIL:TNIELAND@FALCON> Subject: L&T/VAX SIG Tape Reviews: Part 2 -- DECUS UUCP To: info-vax@kl.sri.com, vmsnet@AAMRL.AF.MIL:TNIELAND@FALCON X-Vms-To: IN%"info-vax@kl.sri.com",IN%"vmsnet" The Spring 1989 L&T/VAX SIG Tape Reviews Part 2: DECUS UUCP Review Jon Pinkley Westinghouse Electric Corporation Introduction by Ted Nieland Control Data Corporation This is a review of the DECUS UUCP section of Spring 1989 L&T/VAX SIG Tape. Due to the large amount of overlap between the L&T and VAX SIG tapes, the Tape editors decided to combine the tapes into one large tape with no overlap. This SIGs tape contains many useful items for people with VAX Computers and people interested in Languages and Tools. The reviews of the L&T submissions to the tape will be published in Leverage. The remaining VAX Submissions will appear elsewhere (or in future issue(s) of the Pageswapper. The reviewers have scoured through most of the tape and have jotted down the following notes on the material that is on the tape. Not everything on the tape is reviewed due to the shear volume of material, but it is hoped that this review will help people in deciding what on the tape might be useful to them. The SIG tapes are a project started by the SIGs a while back as a method of distributing free software that might be helpful to others. Not all of the material on the tapes are "finished" products. The encapsulated reviews are rated on a 1-5 scale with 5 being excellent. DECUS UUCP is the result of the VAX SIG's VMSNET Working group. It is VMS version of the UUCP protocol for transmitting message across dial-up lines. VMS systems can now become part of the world-wide UUCP network. Due to the major importance of this submission, the review is being published separately. Submission Subdirectory: [VAX89A3.UUCP] Ease of installation: 3 Documentation: 5 Intended Audience: General Ease of use: 5 Usefulness: 5 Sources included: Yes, VAX C, VAX Pascal, Macro Objects supplied: Yes Introduction: Just what is UUCP? UUCP is an acronym for Unix to Unix CoPy. You may wonder what good that will do on your VMS machine; it provides the underlying mechanism for a every flexible E-mail system. I stole the following from the DECUS UUCP System Manager's Guide: "DECUS UUCP is a partial implementation of uucp facilities for VMS systems. It provides support for uucp mail and news transfer, allowing you to join the existing uucp mail and news network. There is no provision for user-requested file transfers (in other words, no "uucp" DCL command is included), nor for arbitrary remote command execution (no "uux" command either)." DECUS UUCP provides VMS with the capability of exchanging mail with other uucp capable systems. This is normally done via a dial-up connection. The mail system is a store and forward system, so a direct connection is not needed between the systems exchanging mail. You can use this for a company private mail network or you can "join" the "uucp mail network" by arranging a connection to a current network site, and publishing your "uucp map entry". As part of the uucp mail network, anyone else in the network that knows your uucp address can send you mail. Mail can also be exchanged with systems on other networks via gateways -- systems that are connected to more than a single network, and can forward mail between them. There are gateways connecting the uucp network, the Internet, SPAN, Bitnet, HEPNET, Digital's Easynet, Fidonet, and others. Think about that a minute. This provides VMS with an integrated E-mail system that is more widely connected than many dedicated mail servers. Your user's won't have to log into a separate machine just to read their mail. In fact, they won't even need to learn to use a new user interface to receive and reply to mail. To send mail to another system, they will only need to know how to specify a uucp or internet style address. They will still use the standard VMS MAIL utility to send and receive mail. The second major feature of DECUS UUCP is the capability of sending and receiving "Netnews". The package is capable of exchanging News with Unix (or other DECUS UUCP) sites using the preferred "compressed rnews" format. The usenet news is a set of diverse newsgroups that get distributed among cooperating sites. DECUS UUCP V1.1 integrates ANU NEWS V5.7, which is a VMS Netnews utility. See the review of ANU NEWS which follows for details. As you can tell, I am impressed by this submission. (Thanks a lot Jamie Hanrahan, Tom Allebrandi and Mark Pizzolato.) Installation: Installing this package is not trivial, there are a lot of details to consider, and you will have to find another site to exchange mail with. If possible, find someone else that has installed DECUS UUCP on their system and discuss things with them. There is a lot of documentation, and you really do need to read it. Once you are on the net, you will be able to get help via the network... the problem is getting booted up the first time. Fortunately, once the installation is complete, there is very little that must be done to maintain it. Even the mail routing tables are updated automatically if you receive the Netnews comp.mail.maps newsgroup. You will have to install ANU NEWS to get this feature. The only training necessary for users is informing them how to specify the address in mail. The package makes use of the mail "foreign protocol interface" that was first publicly documented by Kevin Carosso. Addresses are specified as UUCP%"user@internet-domain" or UUCP%"firsthop!secondhop!destination!user". But what about Security? Did you say dial-up? To increase security, this version of uucp is intentionally crippled. It does not allow arbitrary commands to be executed on behalf of the remote site. The remote site is restricted to creating files in the designated "spool" directory only. As shipped, DECUS uucp is considerably more secure than Unix uucp (albeit, less flexible). None of the security holes exploited by the "Internet Worm" of November, 1988 are applicable to this uucp implementation (it affected only TCP/IP connections). Because security is a major concern of many VAX system managers, making DECUS UUCP secure was a paramount goal of the project. The uucp dial-in accounts run within "captive" accounts, and do not have any privilege other than TMPMBX. For the timid, you can configure your site to be a dial-out only site, but you will them have to poll another site to check for mail. (Of course you will have to find someone that trusts you to dial in.) Summary: If you want to be part of the metanetwork, this is a good way to get started. Even if you only want a company private mail system between computers at different locations, this provides a good solution. The mail can even be delivered during off peak hours to save money on the phone calls.