[this is a very young working draft]

Focus

Many areas of the world still have poor Internet connectivity, but need email and file transfer; this is especially true where phone lines are hard to come by. We need to establish a cheap and reliable transport.

UUCP served the UNIX community well for many years before the explosion of the Internet -- moving email and USENET news. It runs well over dial-up phone lines, allowing email, USENET, and file transport, as well as remote execution of commands -- if configured for it.

It also can be carried on top of a TCP network connection, so there is a graceful migration path from standard dial-up lines, to dial-up lines running TCP/IP (eg: via PPP), to full-fledged Internet circuits.

This document will try show how to configure SunOS and FreeBSD variants of UUCP for basic transport, and integration with mailers. Other documents will describe a design for a system of local post offices serving desktop/laptop users in the field access to their mail, and a hierarchy of UUCP servers providing transport to the Internet.

Questions wanting answers, loose ends

As yet unresolved questions. Really reminders of document sections to be written.

How to restrict/permit actions, commands (eg: ls, rmail, etc)
Queuing, scheduling (poll?)
Integrating sendmail with uucp

The book Managing uucp and Usenet from O'Reilly and Associates is really helpful. My old 1988 version doesn't cover Taylor UUCP or PC implementations, but the latest may.

Platform-specific issues

I've tried to provide specific configuration information for two implementations of UUCP: SunOS-4.1's and FreeBSD's port of Taylor UUCP. There are of course a lot of details common to both systems, and I document them first.

Common issues

General

Files should be owned by "uucp"; edit them as that user.
If your using TCP transport (Systems->Devices specifies TCP), ensure it's labelled in /etc/services (port 540) and has a daemon on it (eg: uucpd in /etc/inetd.conf).
The remote system uucp user you are trying to log in as (eg: uucp) needs a valid username, password, and the shell should invoke uucico (/etc/passwd).

Configuration details

make sure the system has a uucp name.
if dialup, put a getty on the modem line to answer calls
make sure the uucp user has an account, password and appropriate shell.
Configure names, etc of remote systems, devices, and dialers
Configure to allow appropriate commands (eg: mail, file transfer)

Usage Examples

To send a file to the uucppublic directory:

absinthe% uucp /etc/printcap thanatos\!~/printcaptest

You can also get notification when the job is complete (-m) and notify an intended recipient of the transfer (-n):

absinthe<9> uucp -m -nchris /etc/group thanatos\!~/for-chris/group.test

The notification (SunOS) looks like:

From: uucp
Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 19:12:39 -0400 (EDT)
REQUEST: absinthe!/etc/group --> thanatos!~/for-chris/group.test (chris)
(SYSTEM: thanatos)  copy succeeded

and the recipient (Taylor) gets a notification like:

From uucp Sun Apr  7 19:10:09 1996
Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 19:10:08 -0400
From: UUCP pseudo-user 
To: chris
Subject: UUCP succeeded

Message from UUCP on thanatos Sun Apr  7 19:10:08 1996

The file
	absinthe!/etc/group
was successfully transferred to
	~/for-chris/group.test
as requested by
	chris

SunOS-4.1's stock UUCP

General

uucp comes with SunOS-4, but may not have been installed; if you don't have it, you should be able to get Taylor-uucp and install that instead.
If Uutry won't let you try again because the retry time has not been reached, remove the file /var/spool/uucp/.Status/; I wrote a little script called "uufree" to do this.
PATH includes /usr/lib/uucp
uucheck [-v]: Check sanity of config files
uuname: list Systems names known
Uutry : verbosely try to contact the system

Specific files

hostname: make sure it's got a name
/etc/ttytab: if dialup, put a getty on the line
/etc/uucp/Systems: System, time, Device, speed, phone, chat
/etc/uucp/Devices: Device, cua, ??, class, Dialer
/etc/uucp/Dialers: Dialer, translations, chat
/etc/uucp/Permissions: what commands, upload, download, etc

FreeBSD's port of Taylor UUCP

FreeBSD ships with Taylor UUCP installed. Documentation, in GNU "info" format lives in /usr/share/info. The config file directory is /etc/uucp/.

At the very least, if Taylor is only *accepting* incoming calls from other UUCP systems, it must have the remote systems named in the "sys" file; format is simply "system <incoming_system_name>". More complex configurations are required for having Taylor *originate* connections to remote systems.

Sendmail SMTP/UUCP Integration

I configured UCB Sendmail-8.7.2 to use local, smtp, and uucp mailers. I also had to specify the use of a mailertable to match machines to specific mail transports, else it would try to send via the usual SMTP.

divert(-1)
#  Start from generic SunOS 4.1.x. with local and SMTP mail only.
#  Add support for UUCP.
VERSIONID(`$Id: Welcome.html,v 1.2 1996/04/08 04:58:19 chris Exp $')
OSTYPE(sunos4.1)dnl
DOMAIN(generic)dnl
MAILER(local)dnl
MAILER(smtp)dnl
MAILER(uucp)dnl
FEATURE(mailertable, dbm /etc/mailertable)

This .mc file is turned into a .cf file via make, then installed in the usual place, in this case /etc/sendmail.cf. The daemon must be killed and restarted for this to take effect.

The mailertable maps hosts and domains to mailers, overriding the default use of SMTP. My /etc/mailertable specifies that mail to thanatos goes by uucp:

thanatos.i3inc.com	uucp:thanatos

This has to be converted to a DBM file with the "makemap" command, from the sendmail source distribution under the makemap directory. I used the command:

# makemap dbm /etc/mailertable < /etc/mailertable

Subsequent mail to user@thanatos.uucp caused sendmail to queue up the mail in UUCP, where it waited for the next contact with thanatos. This polling still needs to be documented??

??I see that sending to user@thanatos.uucp or user@thanatos.mydomain both get queued up via UUCP. Is there a way to send user!thanatos.uucp (or thanatos!user) via UUCP, but Internet addresses by SMTP??

Chris Shenton

Last modified: Mon Apr 8 00:57:15 1996