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Encyclopedia > UUCP

UUCP stands for Unix to Unix CoPy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. Specifically, uucp is one of the programs in the suite; it provides a user interface for requesting file copy operations. The UUCP suite also includes uux (user interface for remote command execution), uucico (communication program), uustat (reports statistics on recent activity), uuxqt (execute commands sent from remote machines), and uuname (reports the uucp name of the local system). A computer program is a collection of instructions that describe a task, or set of tasks, to be carried out by a computer. ... In the field of telecommunications, a communications protocol is the set of standard rules for data representation, signalling, authentication and error detection required to send information over a communications channel. ... A computer file is a collection of information that is stored in a computer system and can be identified by its full path name. ... E-mail, or email, is short for electronic mail and is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. ... Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... A BlueGene supercomputer cabinet. ...


Although UUCP was originally developed on and is most closely associated with Unix, UUCP implementations exist for several other operating systems, including Microsoft's MS-DOS, Digital's VAX/VMS, and Mac OS. Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... OpenVMS[1] (Open Virtual Memory System or just VMS) is the name of a high-end computer server operating system that runs on the VAX[2] and Alpha[3] family of computers developed by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts (DIGITAL was then purchased by Compaq, and is now owned... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

Contents

Technology

UUCP can use several different types of physical connections and link-layer protocols, but was most commonly used over dial-up connections. Before the widespread availability of Internet connectivity, computers were only connected by smaller private networks within a company or organization. They were also often equipped with modems so they could be used remotely from character-mode terminals via dial-up lines. UUCP uses the computers' modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, point-to-point links between them. Each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc. When work (file transfer or command execution requests) is queued for a neighbor system, the uucico program typically calls that system to process the work. The uucico program can also poll its neighbors periodically to check for work queued on their side; this permits neighbors without dial-out capability to participate. A modem (a portmanteau word constructed from modulator and demodulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal (sound), to encode digital information, and that also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. ...


Today, UUCP is rarely used over dial-up links, but is occasionally used over TCP/IP. It has been suggested that Internet Protocols be merged into this article or section. ...


One example of the current use of UUCP is in the retail industry by Epicor|CRS Retail Solutions for transferring batch files between corporate and store systems via TCP and dial-up on SCO Unix, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft Windows (with Cygwin). The number of systems involved, as of early 2006, ran between 1500 and 2000 sites across 60 enterprises. UUCP's longevity can be attributed to its low/zero cost, extensive logging, native failover to dialup, and persistent queue management. However, this technology is anticipated to be retired in favor of Windows-only alternatives. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite, often simply referred to as TCP/IP. Using TCP, applications on networked hosts can create connections to one another, over which they can exchange streams of data using Stream Sockets. ... SCO may refer to: Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an international organization. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Red Hat Linux was a popular Linux distribution assembled by Red Hat until the early 2000s, when it was discontinued. ... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ... Cygwin is a collection of free software tools originally developed by Cygnus Solutions to allow various versions of Microsoft Windows to act somewhat like a Unix system. ...


History

UUCP was originally written at AT&T Bell Laboratories, by Mike Lesk, and early versions of UUCP are sometimes referred to as System V UUCP. The original UUCP was rewritten by AT&T researchers Peter Honeyman, David A. Nowitz, and Brian E. Redman and the rewrite is referred to as HDB or HoneyDanBer uucp which was later enhanced, bug fixed, and repackaged as BNU UUCP ("Basic Network Utilities"). All of these versions had security holes which allowed some of the original internet worms to remotely execute unexpected shell commands, which inspired Ian Lance Taylor to write a new version from scratch. Taylor UUCP was released under the GNU General Public License and became the most stable and bug free version. Taylor uucp also incorporates features of all previous versions of uucp, allowing it to communicate with any other version with the greatest level of compatibility and even use similar config file formats from other versions. UUCP was also implemented for non-UNIX operating systems, most-notably MS-DOS systems. Packages such as UUPC, written by Drew Derbyshire and FSUUCP, written by Christopher Ambler brought early Internet connectivity to personal computers. FSUUCP formed the basis for many BBS packages such as Galacticomm's Major BBS and Mustang Software's Wildcat! BBS to connect to the UUCP network and exchange email and Usenet traffic. FSUUCP was notable for being the only other implementation of Taylor's enhanced 'i' protocol, a significant improvement over the standard 'g' protocol used by most UUCP implementations. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Mike Lesk is a computer program writer who created the lex programming tool, a program for Unix computers, with Eric E. Schmidt. ... AT&T UNIX System V was one of the versions of the UNIX operating system. ... This is about the computer worm. ... The GNU logo The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely-used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, playing games, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users. ... Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ...


One surviving feature of uucp is the chat file format, largely inherited by the expect software package. Expect is a Unix automation and testing tool, written by Don Libes, for interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd, fsck, rlogin, tip, ssh, and others. ...


UUCP for mail routing

The uucp and uuxqt capabilities could be used to send e-mail between machines, with suitable mail user interface and delivery agent programs. A simple uucp mail address was formed from the adjacent machine name, an exclamation mark or bang, followed by the user name on the adjacent machine. For example, the address barbox!user would refer to user user on adjacent machine barbox. an exclamation mark An exclamation mark, exclamation point or bang, !, is usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feeling. ... an exclamation mark An exclamation mark, exclamation point or bang, !, is usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feeling. ...


Mail could furthermore be routed through the network, traversing any number of intermediate nodes before arriving at its destination. Initially, this had to be done by specifying the complete path, with a list of intermediate host names separated by bangs. For example, if machine barbox is not connected to the local machine, but it is known that barbox is connected to machine foovax which does communicate with the local machine, the appropriate address to send mail to would be foovax!barbox!user.


User barbox!user might publish their UUCP email address in a form such as …!bigsite!foovax!barbox!user. This directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known and well-connected machine accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user user on barbox. Many users would suggest multiple routes from various large well-known sites, providing even better and perhaps faster connection service from the mail sender.


Bang paths of eight to ten machines (or hops) were not uncommon in 1981, and late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. Some hosts went so far as to try to "rewrite" the path, sending mail via "faster" routes — this practice tended to be frowned upon.


The "pseudo-domain" ending .uucp was sometimes used to designate a hostname as being reachable by UUCP networking, although this was never formally in the Internet root as a top-level domain. .uucp was a pseudo-domain-style suffix used in the late 1980s when identifying a hostname not connected directly to the Internet but possibly reachable through inter-network gateways. ... A top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of an Internet domain name; that is, the letters which follow the final dot of any domain name. ...


UUCPNET and mapping

UUCPNET was the name for the totality of the network of computers connected through UUCP. This network was very informal, maintained in a spirit of mutual cooperation between systems owned by thousands of private companies, universities, and so on. Often, particularly in the private sector, UUCP links were established without official approval from the companies' upper management. The UUCP network was constantly changing as new systems and dial-up links were added, others were removed, etc.


The UUCP Mapping Project was a volunteer, largely successful effort to build a map of the connections between machines that were open mail relays and establish a managed namespace. Each system administrator would submit, by e-mail, a list of the systems to which theirs would connect, along with a ranking for each such connection. These submitted map entries were processed by an automatic program that combined them into a single set of files describing all connections in the network. These files were then published monthly in a newsgroup dedicated to this purpose. The UUCP map files could then be used by software such as "pathalias" to compute the best route path from one machine to another for mail, and to supply this route automatically. The UUCP maps also listed contact information for the sites, and so gave sites seeking to join UUCPNET an easy way to find prospective neighbors. An open mail relay is an SMTP (email) server configured in such a way that it allows anyone on the Internet to relay (i. ... A newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. ...


Connections with the Internet

Many uucp hosts, particularly those at universities, were also connected to the Internet in its early years, and e-mail gateways between Internet SMTP-based mail and UUCP mail were developed. A user at a system with UUCP connections could thereby exchange mail with Internet users, and the Internet links could be used to bypass large portions of the slow UUCP network. A "UUCP zone" was defined within the Internet domain namespace to facilitate these interfaces. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the de facto standard for email transmission across the Internet. ...


With this infrastructure in place, UUCP's strength was that it permitted a site to gain Internet e-mail connectivity with only a dial-up modem link to another cooperating computer. This was at a time when true Internet access required a leased data line providing a connection to an Internet Point of Presence, both of which were expensive and difficult to arrange. By contrast, a link to the UUCP network could usually be established with a few phone calls to the administrators of prospective neighbor systems. Neighbor systems were often close enough to avoid all but the most basic charges for telephone calls.


Decline

UUCP usage began to die out with the rise of ISPs offering inexpensive SLIP and PPP services. The UUCP Mapping Project was formally shut down in late 2000. “ISP” redirects here. ... The Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) is a mostly obsolete encapsulation of the Internet Protocol designed to work over serial ports and modem connections. ... In computing, the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, is commonly used to establish a direct connection between two nodes. ...


Usenet traffic was originally transmitted using the UUCP network, and bang paths are still in use within Usenet message format Path header lines. They now have only an informational purpose, and are not used for routing, although they can be used to ensure that loops do not occur. In general, this form of e-mail address has now been superseded by the SMTP "@ notation", even by sites still using uucp. Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... An -mail address identifies a location to which e-mail messages can be delivered. ... Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the de facto standard for e-mail transmissions across the Internet. ... Look up @ in Wiktionary, the free dictionary A commercial at, @, also called an at symbol, an at sign, or just at, is a symbolic abbreviation for the word at. ...


Currently UUCP is used mainly over high cost links (e.g., marine satellite links). UUCP over TCP/IP (preferably encrypted, such as via the SSH protocol) can be used when a computer doesn't have any fixed IP addresses but is still willing to run a standard mail transfer agent (MTA) like Sendmail or Postfix. In computing, Secure Shell or SSH is a set of standards and an associated network protocol that allows establishing a secure channel between a local and a remote computer. ... An IP address is a unique number, akin to a telephone number, used by machines (usually computers) to refer to each other when sending information through the Internet using the Internet Protocol. ... A mail transfer agent or MTA (also called a mail transport agent, mail server, or a mail exchanger in the context of the Domain Name System) is a computer program or software agent that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another. ... Sendmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that is a well known project of the open source, free software and Unix communities, which is distributed both as free software and proprietary software. ... Postfix is an open source mail transfer agent (MTA), a computer program for the routing and delivery of email, that is intended as a fast, easy to administer and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail. ...


See also

Routing Schemes anycast broadcast multicast unicast In computer networking the term routing (or routeing) refers to selecting paths in a computer network along which to send data. ... A hostname (occasionally also, a sitename) is the unique name by which a computer is known on a network. ... Wizzy Digital Courier is a project to distribute useful data to places with no internet connection. ...

External links


  Results from FactBites:
 
Sendmail cf/README - UUCP Mailers (487 words)
The choice of which one to use is partly a matter of local preferences and what is running at the other end of your UUCP connection.
Unlike good protocols that define what will go over the wire, UUCP uses the policy that you should do what is right for the other end; if they change, you have to change.
If you are using one of the domainized UUCP mailers, you really want to convert all UUCP addresses to domain format -- otherwise, it will do it for you (and probably not the way you expected).
UUCP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (1357 words)
UUCP was originally written at ATandT Bell Laboratories, and early versions of UUCP are sometimes referred to as System V UUCP.
The original UUCP was rewritten by ATandT researchers Peter Honeyman, David A. Nowitz, and Brian E. Redman and the rewrite is referred to as HDB or HoneyDanBer uucp which was later enhanced, bug fixed, and repackaged as BNU UUCP ("Basic Network Utiltites").
UUCP over TCP/IP (preferably encrypted, such as via the SSH protocol) can be used when a computer doesn't have any fixed IP addresses but is still willing to run a standard mail transfer agent (MTA) like Sendmail or Postfix.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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