uuxqt and remote mail

[Alexis Rosen]

J.Pearce at cs.ucl.ac.uk (John Pearce) writes:
> We have finally managed to track down the problem with uuxqt to
> /usr/lib/uucp/USERFILE. We are using system specific uucp logins
> and have found that the following entry in USERFILE solves the
> problem.
> 
> $ more USERFILE
> uheimdall , heimdall /usr/spool/uucppublic
> $
> 
> The spaces either side of the first comma that separates the login
> name and system seem to be critical - without them you get the
> problems my colleague reported in his earlier message.

I'm _sure_ you've got this wrong. That's because neither we nor any other
A/UX site I know of have to do this. I think the solution I sent you was
correct, and that the reason that your entry works is that it doesn't say
what you think it says.

The whitespace before the comma means that the first field is finished. So
there is _NO_ user name, just a system name. The comma and "heimdall" in that
line are being taken as the second and third fields in the file, which are
usually left blank. (They don't do anything, if I recall correctly, at least
for those values, in A/UX.)

I highly recommend the book "Managing uucp and Usenet", from Nutshell. If I'd
had it, instead of the Pyramid UUCP man pages (Apple's _still_ don't exist),
I'd have had a much easier time setting things up two years ago.

> However, we have now struck another minor, but nevertheless annoying
> problem. As an added security precaution we have tried to get the
> conversation count feature to work. As stated in the A/UX manuals
> we simply added the remote system name to the SQFILE. However, this
> just results in bad sequence number messages at both ends.
> [etc., more details]

Well, I've never used them. But I just checked with my trusty Nutshell handbook,
and it says that you've got things right here. But it also says that implemen-
tations of SQFILE vary widely, and are often not implemented at all.

Lastly, if you're running A/UX 2.0.0, your man pages are completely wrong
anyway. They're for BSD UUCP. (Of course, Apple's "fix" for this in 2.0.1
was to replace the man pages, not the UUCP. Sigh.)

I would skip the SQFILE, and stick with the individual-system logins as you
have done. That's pretty good security. You could always implement callback
if you're really paranoid (through USERFILE, if that works {I haven't tried
it} or by writing a simple shell script to replace uushell).

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
alexis at panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis