Xenix mail system

[Jim O'Connor]

In article <6800065 at cpe>, tif at cpe.UUCP writes:
> 
> The purpose for all the other unexplained stuff has to do with
> the networking implemented by Microsoft (micnet).  It also allows
> some pretty powerful aliasing.

I'm glad to see someone else uses micnet.  I was beginning to think I was the
only one after receiving many "mic-what?" responses every time I mentioned it.
Actaully, the aliasing is part of the mail system, which can be used 
independently from micnet if you want to.

> I'm a bit defensive of anything that sounds like criticisms of micnet
> because it works and most people are too set in their ways to try it.

Amen.

> There are actually no users on the machine which answers the phone as
> "cpe."  All the users are scattered on several different machines
> which all talk to each other by micnet.  Micnet isn't transparent
> or anything fancy but it works better than UUCP for tightly connected
> systems.  (It is transparent as far as mail paths go.)

It's also transparent as far as the topology of the network goes. The command

$ rcp myfile siteA:/tmp/myfile

will always work no matter how you've got connections made between here and
siteA.

Despite all the things I like about it, there are some legitimate short-falls.

1) - our systems usually report < 50% line utilization, e.g. ~ 400cps on a
     dedicated 9600 baud line, with out retransmissions.  Apparently, there is
     some significant overhead.

2) - process order; i.e. jobs are not processed in the order they are received.
     They are not processed in any consistent order that I can detect.

3) - start up time; worst case time between when something is submited and when
     it starts to be transfered is two minutes.  This seems high for a dedicated
     line connection.

4) - log messages and diagnostics;  with the amount and type of traffic I've
     got running on micnet, I would really like to see better log messages and
     diagnostics.

These are usually the reasons uucp proponents give for why I should use uucp
instead of micnet, but I still think micnet wins in tightly coupled situations,
especially when some of your machines are running Altos 3.4 Xenix, or earlier,
which has one the least capable uucp's I've ever seen.  Next weekend we will
be completely re-wiring out micnet network to use a different machine as the
center node in our star topology, and because we use micnet, the users
should never notice.

--jim
------------- 
James B. O'Connor			jim at FSC.COM
Filtration Sciences Corporation		615/821-4022 x. 651