Scripts to deal with A/UX's buggy UUCP

[Alexis Rosen]

In article <1991Mar12.170918.29890 at mitem> unger at mitem (Tom Unger) writes:
[ in response to my uupoll script ]
>I too wrote a uupoll program when setting up uucp.  Mine is a bit
>simpler, all it does is write a dummy control file to the spool
>directory.  Next time uucico is run it will attempt to call any systems
>that have control files.  uucico will retry (every hour by default)
>until it gets through.  I run uucico every 15 minutes and don't mind
>the backoff and retry strategy that uucico uses.

This is OK for systems that don't have a high load. The problem is, with
heavily loaded systems, you can get so many SEND/SLAVE MODE failures that
if you don't retry for an hour, you may jam the queue for half a day.

You can make this workable, though, even in heavy-usage situations. Put a
",10" after the times-to-call field in the L.sys file. But even this has its
drawbacks. If the target system is down, or the lines are _really_ bad, you'll
wind up calling a gazillion times, possibly running up one hell of a phone
bill. You can solve _that_ problem by not calling so often... but then you're
back to problem number one, jamming the UUCP queue.

In general, I'd say your solution is quite elegant, for a low-load system. I
don't think it will work under high-volume conditions. On the other hand, there
may not be many A/UX systems with what I consider to be high load conditions...

>I also have a uugetty that allows both dial in and dial out on the same
>line.  I don't know if it is the best solution but has been working OK
>for me.

I chose to use a script rather than replace A/UX's getty, since the getty
now understands UUCP lock files. But it's six of one, half a dozen of the
other.

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