All articles will be evaluated against the required posting format listed below. Any map not conforming will be returned to the sender for updates.
Any article that is not a UUCP mapping project format map will be returned to the sender, with a copy provided to the senders ISP, and the senders USENET news posting service.
The entire map is intended to be processed by pathalias, a program that generates UUCP routes from this data. All lines beginning in `#' are comment lines to pathalias, however the UUCP Mapping Project has defined a set of these comment lines to have specific format so that a complete database could be built.
The generic form of these lines is
#<field id letter><tab><field data>
Each host has an entry in the following format. The entry should begin with the #N line, end with a blank line after the pathalias data, and not contain any other blank lines, since there are ed, sed, and awk scripts that use expressions like /^#N $1/,/^$/ for the purpose of separating the map out into files, each containing one site entry.
#N UUCP name of site
#S manufacturer machine model; operating system & version
#O organization name
#C contact person's name
#E contact person's electronic mail address
#T contact person's telephone number
#P organization's address
#L latitude / longitude
#R remarks
#U netnews neighbors
#W who last edited the entry ; date edited
#
sitename .domain
sitename remote1(FREQUENCY), remote2(FREQUENCY),
remote3(FREQUENCY)
Example of a completed entry:
#N academ,academ.houston.tx.us,academ.com
#S Victor 486/50; BSDOS 1.1
#O Academ Consulting Services
#C Stan Barber
#E sob@academ.com
#T +1 713 790 9553
#P P.O. Box 300481, Houston, Texas USA 77230-0481
#L 29 42 N / 95 23 W city
#U news.sesqui.net cs.utexas.edu news.usis.com bcm
#W academ!sob (Stan Barber); Fri May 12 19:26:27 CDT 1995
#R academ is the primary uucp gateway for Academ Consulting Services
academ=academ.houston.tx.us
academ .academ.com(LOCAL)
academ nuchat(DIRECT),uhnix1(DIRECT),cyberlaw(POLLED)
Specific Field Descriptions
#N system name
Your system's UUCP name should go here. Either the uname(1) command from System III or System V UNIX; or the uuname(1) command from Version 7 or BSD UNIX will tell you what UUCP is using for the local UUCP name.
One of the goals of the UUCP Project is to keep duplicate UUCP host names from appearing because there exist mailers in the world which assume that the UUCP name space contains no duplicates (and attempts UUCP path optimization on that basis), and it's just plain confusing to have two different sites with the same name.
At present, the most severe restriction on UUCP names is that the name must be unique somewhere in the first six characters, because of a poor software design decision made by AT&T for the System V release of UNIX.
This does not mean that your site name has to be six characters or less in length. Just unique within that length.
The UUCP Mapping Project does not accept hostnames that contain uppercase letters, or any punctuation other than dash or period. Periods may only be used if the site name is a fully qualified domain name in a domain registered with InterNIC Registration Services for the Internet.
Domains may be listed as well by putting a leading period. If you are listing both a domain and a uucp name, please put the uucpname FIRST in the list and the domain last.
With regard to choosing system names, HARRIS'S LAMENT:
``All the good ones are taken.''
#S machine type; operating system
This is a quick description of your equipment. Machine type should be manufacturer and model, and after a semi-colon(;), the operating system name and version number (if you have it). Some examples:
#O organization name
This should be the full name of your organization, squeezed to fit inside 80 columns as necessary. Don't be afraid to abbreviate where the abbreviation would be clear to the entire world (say a famous institution like MIT or CERN), but beware of duplication (In USC the C could be either California or Carolina).
#C contact person
This should be the full name (or names, separated by commas) of the person responsible for handling queries from the outside world about your machine.
#E contact person's electronic address
This should be just a machine name, and a user name, like `academ!sob'. It should not be a full path, since we will be able to generate a path to the given address from the data you're giving us. There is no problem with the machine name not being the same as the #N field (i.e. the contact `lives' on another machine at your site).
Also, it's a good idea to give a generic address or alias (if your mail system is capable of providing aliases) like `usenet' or `postmaster', so that if the contact person leaves the institution or is re-assigned to other duties, he doesn't keep getting mail about the system. In a perfect world, people would send notice to the UUCP Mapping Project, but in practice, they don't, so the data does get out of date. If you give a generic address you can easily change it to point at the appropriate person.
Multiple electronic addresses should be separated by commas, and all of them should be specified in the manner described above.
#T contact person's telephone number
Format: +
Example:
This is the international format for the representation of phone
numbers. The country code for the United States of America (and
Canada) is 1. Other country codes should be listed in your telephone
book.
If you must list an extension (i.e. what to ask the receptionist for,
if not the name of the contact person), list it after the main phone
number with an `x' in front of it to distinguish it from the rest of
the phone number.
Example:
Multiple phone numbers should be separated by commas, and all of them
should be completely specified as described above to prevent
confusion (in particular, you should avoid the use of "-").
This field should be one line filled with whatever else anyone would
need after the contact person's name, and your organization's name
(given in other fields above), to mail you something by paper mail.
Please try to include the three-letter ISO country code as part of the
address.
This should be in the following format:
Two fields, with optional third.
First number is Latitude in degrees (DD), minutes (MM), and seconds
(SS), and a N or S to indicate North or South of the Equator.
A Slash Separator.
Second number is Longitude in degrees (DDD), minutes (MM), and seconds
(SS), and a E or W to indicate East or West of the Prime Meridian in
Greenwich, England.
Seconds are optional, but it is worth noting that the more accurate
you are, the more accurate maps we can make of the network (including
blow-ups of various high density areas, like New Jersey, or the San
Francisco Bay Area).
If you give the coordinates for your city (i.e. without fudging for
where you are relative to that), add the word `city' at the end of the
end of the specification, to indicate that. If you know where you are
relative to a given coordinate for which you have longitude and
latitude data, then the following fudge factors can be useful:
For LONGITUDE, multiply the above numbers by the cosine of your
latitude. For instance, at latitude 35 degrees, a degree of longitude
is 69.2*0.819 = 56.7 miles; at latitude 40 degrees, it is 69.2*0.766 =
53.0 miles. If you don't see why the measure of longitude depends on
your latitude, just think of a globe, with all those N-S meridians of
longitude converging on the poles. You don't do this cosine
multiplication for LATITUDE.
Here is a short cosine table in case you don't have a trig calculator
handy. (But you can always write a short program in C. The cosine
function in bc(1) doesn't seem to work as documented.)
The Prime Meridian is through Greenwich, England, and longitudes run
from 180 degrees West of Greenwich to 180 East. Latitudes run from
90 degrees North of the Equator to 90 degrees South.
This is for one line of comment. As noted before, all lines beginning
with a `#' character are comment lines, so if you need more than one
line to tell us something about your site, do so between the end of the
map data (the #?\t fields) and the pathalias data.
The USENET is the network that moves netnews around, specifically,
news.announce.important. If you send news.announce.important to any of
your UUCP neighbors, list their names here, delimited by spaces.
Example:
Since some places have lots of USENET neighbors, continuation lines
should be just another #U and more site names.
This field should contain an email address, a name in parentheses,
followed by a semi-colon, and the output of the date program.
Example:
The same rules for email address that apply in the contact's email
address apply here also. (i.e. only one system name, and user name).
It is intended that this field be used for automatic aging of the
map entries so that we can do more automated checking and updating
of the entire map. See getdate(3) from the netnews source for other
acceptable date formats.
The DEMAND, DAILY, etc., entries represent imaginary connect costs (see
below) used by pathalias to calculate lowest cost paths. The cost
breakdown is:
NOTE: Please do not use DEAD in maps you send to the project. Just
remove those sites from your map data. It generates much better maps.
Additionally, FAST, HIGH and LOW (used like DAILY+HIGH) are -80, -5 and +5
respectively, for baud-rate or quality bonuses/penalties, and
FAST is -80 for adjusting links that use high-speed (i.e., 9600
bps or more) modems. Arithmetic expressions can be used; however,
you should be aware that the results are often counter-intuitive
(e.g. (DAILY*4) means every 4 days, not 4 times a day). This is
because the numbers represent "cost of connection" rather than
"frequency of connection", and reflect the ease with which your
system can connect to another. For example, if a site cannot be
called, it should be rated at a higher cost than one that can
be dialed at any time. There is an assumed high overhead for each hop;
thus, HOURLY is far more than DAILY/24.
There are a few other cost names that sometimes appear in the map.
Some are synonyms for the preferred names above (e.g. POLLED is assumed
to mean overnight and is taken to be the same as DAILY), some are
obsolete (e.g. the letters A through F, which are letter grades for
connections.) It is not acceptable to make up new names or spellings
(pathalias gets very upset when people do that...).
If a site should not be used to route email through it (but
email can be sent to it), surround the name with angle brackets
to mark it as a terminal node:
If you are using a registered domain name, you can express
routing to local hosts by forwarding:
We do not want local area network information in the published map.
If you want to put your LAN in your local Path.* files, read about
the LAN syntax in the pathalias manual page.
Once you have finished constructing your pathalias entry, mail it off
to academ!uucpmap, which will be sent to the appropriate regional map
coordinator. They maintain assigned geographic sections of the map,
and the entire map is posted on a rolling basis in the USENET newsgroups
comp.mail.maps over the course of a month. If you wish, you can also
mail your map directly to your regional coordinator for processing using
the email addresses listed in this document.
#T +1 713 798 6042
#T +1 415 549 3854 x37
#P organization's postal address
#L latitude and longitude
#L DD MM [SS] "N"|"S" / DDD MM [SS] "E"|"W" ["city"]
1 degree = 69.2 miles = 111 kilometers
1 minute = 1.15 miles = 1.86 kilometers
1 second = 102 feet = 30.9 meters
deg cos deg cos deg cos deg cos deg cos deg cos
0 1.000 5 0.996 10 0.985 15 0.966 20 0.940 25 0.906
30 0.866 35 0.819 40 0.766 45 0.707 50 0.643 55 0.574
60 0.500 65 0.423 70 0.342 75 0.259 80 0.174 85 0.087
#R remarks
#U netnews neighbors
#U academ rice cs.utexas.edu
#W who last edited the entry and when
#W bcm!sob (Stan Barber); Mon Aug 27 22:21:10 CDT 1990
PATHALIAS DATA
(or, documenting your UUCP connections & frequency of use)
LOCAL 25 local area network DEDICATED 100 high speed dedicated DIRECT 200 local call DEMAND 300 normal call (long distance, anytime) HOURLY 500 hourly poll EVENING 2000 time restricted call DAILY 5000 daily poll WEEKLY 30000 irregular poll DEAD a very high number - not usable path
myhost
myhost = myhost.my.domain
myhost <.my.domain>(DEDICATED)
LOCAL AREA NETWORKS
WHAT TO DO WITH THIS STUFF
Failing to follow the above formatting requirements could result in an article being canceled instantly and without warning by an authorized moderation device (human or otherwise) for the group in question. Articles cross-posted to other groups and dfw.maps must still follow the criteria of dfw.maps and be subject to these rules.