30 Jun
2020
30 Jun
'20
2:06 a.m.
On 6/29/20 11:20 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
I can try to pull some info from long ago paged out
memory.
Some effort would be appreciated. But please don't dig too deeply or
disturb too much accumulated dust. ;-)
I havent had to run UUCP since the late 1990s. By
the Stellar time,
we were on the Internet and UUCP had pretty much become unnecessary
for most folks.
TCP/IP and the Internet serve me quite well. But I've found that the
background store-and-forward nature of UUCP is nice for some things.
Particularly when one of the systems in the path is offline or not
readily accessible.
I recently moved a 4.7 GB DVD around between three systems just to see
if I could. It worked quite well. It took ~2 minutes per hop. The
email notification at the end was nice too.
I was doing some reading of the Taylor UUCP manual last night and
learned that uux can operate on files that are on other systems.
uux sys1!diff sys2!file1 sys3!file2
Something like that.
I've not had a need for that yet. But I do like the idea.
BSD was originally based on V7 UUCP with some fixes.
Eventually
Honey-Dan-Ber came out in the very early 1980s and most of the
commercial UNIX's licensed/relicensed/redistributed it. V7 and HDB were
the versions that built the USENET.
#respect
As Larry said, V7 definition needed a baby sister, HDB
got to the point
that it pretty much worked without having to watch it too much.
Good to know.
The biggest issue was that disks were much smaller in
those days and
overflow of the spool area was not uncommon.
Ah. That makes sense.
I would think that the byte count / size of the file would be checked
before the transfer was started. But maybe that's the benefit of
learning from 40 years of experience that others have had.
I can also see how multiple inbound connections ~> copies could
complicate things too.
Taylor UUCP was much later and was a mostly FOSS
implementation of
H-D-B. I never ran it.
I know that Taylor UUCP supports a TCP mode. I don't know if HDB
supported a TCP mode or not. I assume that the old V7 did not.
The original ORA UUCP manual (that Tim actually wrote
the first draft)
was always the definitive guide to running.
I'll look that up.
I naively see the O'Reilly UUCP book as the definitive source often
mentioned.
As I type that I wonder if ORA is O'Reilly Associates. <thinking emoji>
What protocol is it running?
"e"
Chesson's 'g' protocol (which was the
default).
I want ~> need to learn more about the protocols.
How is the chatting being done? That's were
most issues tended occur.
Chat isn't really happening.
chat "" ""
My understanding is that chat is needed to log into the remote system.
Seeing as how I'm using SSH with key based authentication, there really
isn't any typical log in process. The SSH connection is running uucico
as the remote command. So it's really (local) uucico talking to SSH's
STDIO which is (remotely) running uucico.
Remember the expect(1) program was created by the
folks at NIST
modelling after Ber's version of chat for H-D-B. My guess is that
something in macOS's way of running login might be doing something
unexpected and confusing uucico.
I'm trying to ""dial out from macOS into Linux.
Saying "trying" is somewhat of a misnomer as it is working perfectly
when I run uucico as the _uucp user.
The only apparent problem is related to users other than the _uucp user
prompting the call. I need to do some more investigating on this.
I can initiate actions as my normal user; uucp, uuto, etc. and they
properly queue actions. They also spur a call, which fails. If I
subsequently spur a call as the _uucp user, things work perfectly fine.
I might suggest try debugging with two computers
talking over a serial
link. Just add a USB to serial to each of your systems. Set up a
login one link and get the other side to open the other.
I agree with your logic. However, I think that I'm past anything
related to the UUCP chat.
More specifically, I think my problem is related to the SSH ""serial
(line alternative).
The hard part is Apple dorked the login scheme from
traditional
UNIX/so you'll need to make sure it does not try to do something
too funny.
ACK
I have a handicap of of not knowing what's macOS issues vs what's simply
a difference from the BSD family vs Linux what I'm used to.
Basically you need to be able to run cu (or the equiv)
from one system
to the other and login in a normal user.
cu targetSystemName seems to work.
I get "Connected." followed by "Shere=targetSystemName".
Note: I've got the remote system automatically launching uucico. This
works perfectly fine when running uucico as the _uucp user.
If you can do that and nothing is screwy, then try to
login at user
uucp and see if uucico is properly forked.
Perhaps I should clarify somethings:
- All of my systems are using the same configuration.
- Think template with some values adjusted as necessary.
- UUCP on all systems ssh out to to other systems as the host name.
- hostA logs into hostB and hostC as the hostA user.
- hostB logs into hostA and hostC as the hostB user.
- hostC logs into hostA and hostB as the hostC user.
- All systems have an account on the systems that they log into.
- Random 63 character passwords that I no longer have.
- SSH keys are used for all authentication.
- SSH automatically launches uucico.
- command: ssh targetSystemName /usr/sbin/uucico
- authorized_keys: command="/usr/sbin/uucico" ...
Maybe the answer is pull an old getty/login pair off
BSD and set up a
daemon to fake it so that Apple login stuff is not in the way. But the
trick is that once you make that work, you can then set upuucp theway it
was expected to run.
Given that the UUCP link works, seemingly perfectly fine, when run as
the _uucp user, I think this is more a macOS (BSD?) issue than it is a
UUCP link issue.
FWIW: ssh did not exist when UUCP transitioned to
running on IP - so I
suspect it was never really, debugged worked out. There was no need.
I've got multiple other systems running the same config and they are
working perfectly fine.
My issues came into being when I started trying to add a macOS system to
the UUCP network.
Just so you know, a couple of UUCP of ethernet were
done. I wrote the
first one (the e protocol) for the Masscomp systems, which I gave back
to Sam and Keith was in the BSD release. IIRC there were a couple of
others that different people did also.
UUCP of Ethernet? Please elaborate.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die