uucp Handshake error summary (* LONG *)

[Future Unix Gurus]

Hello,

About two weeks ago, I posted an article stating that I was getting a
handshake error when I tried to poll this particular site.  Well it's 
been solved.  I'm going to summarize here what I did, so if you're not
interested hit n.

Well, thanks to everyone who had ideas about what was wrong, but here's
what actually was wrong:  BDS (Brain Dead Stock) uucp sets up it's permissions
in a file: /usr/lib/uucp/USERFILE.  The problem arose when the site that I
was trying to poll gave me a home directory that didn't fit in with the
permissions set up in USERFILE.  The problem was cleared when USERFILE
gave me permission to use the directory which was my home directory.

I guess this is kind of a warning to people who have BDS uucp and not 
HDB.  MAKE SURE THAT /usr/lib/uucp/USERFILE IS SET UP PROPERLY!  I don't
know how it works in HDB, but in BDS (aka version 2) you have to specify
restrictions.  The system assumes no restrictions until you specify them.
Make sure that you specify them correctly.

USERFILE should have entries like this:

[<login>],[<sys-name>] [c] <top directory in> [<top directory out>]

where:	<login> is the login that a system uses to access the machine
	, is a required delimeter
	<sys-name> is the name of the machine that is accessing the account
	" " there a space here, but I think a tab character will also work
	c is a flag (it must be the actual character 'c') which specifies call
	  back.  i.e. if machine a calls machine b and b has this option set,
	  b will hang up with machine a but call machine a back.(I'm not sure
	  if this is 100% accurate but it's close)
	" " there is a space here
	<top directory in> is the top directory that a machine using <login>
	  with system name <sys-name> can access.
	" " there is a space here
	<top directory out> is the top directory that a user accessing uucp
	  on the local system is allowed to "uucp" from.

(note options specified in [] are optional, options specified in <> you
must provide the actual parameter)

There are a lot of things that must be taken into account when setting up
this file.  I'm not going to elaborate on them here, I would recommend
getting some reading materials on it.  The reading materials that I got
came from a book called "System Administration for Unix System V" by Rebecca
Thomas and Rik Farrow.  It includes a chapter on UUCP.  It's quite a good
book, containing lots of hints about administering a unix machine.

I don't know who publishes it off-hand, so I obviously have no relation to
the publisher other than a satisfied customer (at least in this case).

Sorry for being long-winded,
- sparkie
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\___\| __/|   || _ /|   < | || _[ 
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ARPA:	madnix!harier!sparkie at cs.wisc.edu
UUCP:	...lakesys!tbaas!harier!sparkie  or
	...madnix!harier!sparkie