UUCP is an abbreviation An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. Usually, but not always, it consists of a letter or group of letters taken from the word or phrase. For example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv. or abbrev for Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task for a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute the instructions. The same program in its human- and protocols In the field of telecommunications, a communications protocol is the set of standard rules for data representation, signaling, authentication and error detection required to send information over a communications channel. An example of a simple communications protocol adapted to voice communication is the case of a radio dispatcher talking to allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files A computer file is a block of arbitrary information, or resource for storing information, which is available to a computer program and is usually based on some kind of durable storage. A file is durable in the sense that it remains available for programs to use after the current program has finished. Computer files can be considered as the modern, email Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages across the Internet or other computer networks. Email systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which email server computer systems accept, forward, deliver and store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the email infrastructure, and netnews Usenet, a portmanteau of "user" and "network", is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It evolved from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name between computers A computer is a programmable machine that receives input, stores and manipulates data//information, and provides output in a useful format. Specifically, UUCP is one of the programs in the suite; it provides a user interface for requesting file copy operations. The UUCP suite also includes uux (user interface for remote command execution), uucico (communication program), uustat (reports statistics on recent activity), uuxqt (execute commands sent from remote machines), and uuname (reports the uucp name of the local system).

Although UUCP was originally developed on and is most closely associated with Unix Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit, UUCP implementations exist for several other operating systems, including Microsoft's MS-DOS MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers, which was purchased by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for personal computers during the 1980s up to mid 1990s. It was preceded by M-DOS (also called MIDAS), designed and copyrighted by Microsoft, Digital's VAX/VMS OpenVMS , previously known as VAX-11/VMS, VAX/VMS or (informally) VMS, is a high-end computer server operating system that runs on VAX, Alpha and Itanium-based families of computers. Contrary to its name, OpenVMS is not open source software. Unlike some other mainframe-oriented operating systems, OpenVMS has a GUI with quite complete graphics, Commodore's AmigaOS AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000. Early versions run on the Motorola 68k series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors, while the newer AmigaOS 4 runs only on PowerPC microprocessors, and Mac OS Mac OS is the trademark-protected name for a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface. The original form of what Apple would later name the "Mac OS" was the.

Technology

UUCP can use several different types of physical connections and link layer In computer networking, the Link Layer is the lowest layer in the Internet Protocol Suite, the networking architecture of the Internet . It is the group of methods or protocols that only operate on a host's link. The link is the physical and logical network components used to interconnect hosts or nodes in the network and a link protocol is a protocols, but was most commonly used over dial-up Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses telephone lines. The user's computer or router uses an attached modem connected to a telephone line to dial into an Internet service provider's node to establish a modem-to-modem link, which is then used to route Internet Protocol packets between the user's equipment and hosts connections. Before the widespread availability of Internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and connectivity, computers were only connected by smaller private networks within a company or organization. They were also often equipped with modems A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data. Modems can be used over any means of transmitting analog so they could be used remotely from character-mode terminals via dial-up lines. UUCP uses the computers' modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, point-to-point links between them. Each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc. When work (file transfer or command execution requests) is queued for a neighbor system, the uucico program typically calls that system to process the work. The uucico program can also poll its neighbors periodically to check for work queued on their side; this permits neighbors without dial-out capability to participate.

Today, UUCP is rarely used over dial-up links, but is occasionally used over TCP/IP The Internet Protocol Suite is the set of communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks. It is named from two of the most important protocols in it: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), which were the first two networking protocols defined in this standard. Today's IP networking.^[1][2]

One example of the current use of UUCP is in the retail industry by Epicor CRS Retail Systems for transferring batch files between corporate and store systems via TCP The Transmission Control Protocol is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. TCP is one of the two original components of the suite (the other being Internet Protocol, or IP), so the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. Whereas IP handles lower-level transmissions from computer to computer as a message makes its way and dial-up on SCO OpenServer SCO OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO Open Desktop , is a closed source version of the Unix computer operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and now maintained by the SCO Group, Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004, and Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal (with Cygwin Cygwin is a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows. Cygwin provides native integration of Windows-based applications, data, and other system resources with applications, software tools, and data of the Unix-like environment. Thus it is possible to launch Windows applications from the Cygwin environment, as well as).^{[citation needed]} The number of systems involved, as of early 2006, ran between 1500 and 2000 sites across 60 enterprises. UUCP's longevity can be attributed to its low/zero cost, extensive logging, native failover In computing, failover is the capability to switch over automatically to a redundant or standby computer server, system, or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active application, server, system, or network. Failover happens without human intervention and generally without warning, unlike switchover to dialup, and persistent queue management.

History

UUCP was originally written at AT&T Bell Laboratories, by Mike Lesk, and early versions of UUCP are sometimes referred to as System V Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV , is one of the versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, termed Releases 1, 2, 3 and 4. System V Release 4, or SVR4, was commercially the most successful UUCP.^[when?] The original UUCP was rewritten A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch. When instead only parts are re-engineered, which have otherwise become complicated to handle or by AT&T researchers Peter Honeyman, David A. Nowitz, and Brian E. Redman and the rewrite is referred to as HDB or HoneyDanBer uucp which was later enhanced, bug fixed, and repackaged as BNU UUCP ("Basic Network Utilities").

None of these versions were distributed with source code, which inspired Ian Lance Taylor to write a new version from scratch. ^[3] Taylor UUCP was released under the GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project and became the most stable and bug free version. In particular Taylor UUCP addressed security holes which allowed some of the original internet worms A computer worm is a self-replicating malware computer program. It uses a computer network to send copies of itself to other nodes and it may do so without any user intervention. This is due to security shortcomings on the target computer. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least to remotely execute unexpected shell commands. Taylor UUCP also incorporates features of all previous versions of UUCP, allowing it to communicate with any other version with the greatest level of compatibility and even use similar config file formats from other versions.

UUCP was also implemented for non-UNIX Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit operating systems, most-notably MS-DOS systems. Packages such as UUSLAVE/GNUCICO (John Gilmore John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project, Garry Paxinos, Tim Pozar), UUPC (Drew Derbyshire) and FSUUCP (Christopher Ambler of IODesign, - ".web" tld of the 1990s), brought early Internet connectivity to personal computers, expanding the network beyond the interconnected university systems. FSUUCP formed the basis for many BBS A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users, either through electronic mail packages such as Galacticomm's Major BBS and Mustang Software's Wildcat! BBS Wildcat! is a bulletin board system software package developed in 1986 by Mustang Software to create a dial-up BBS operating under DOS. It was later ported to Microsoft Windows. By the release of Version 4 it was the basis for over 50,000 bulletin boards worldwide.[citation needed] to connect to the UUCP network and exchange email and Usenet Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post public messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; traffic. As an example, UFGATE (John Galvin, Garry Paxinos, Tim Pozar) was a package that provided a gateway between networks running Fidonet and UUCP protocols.

FSUUCP was notable for being the only other implementation of Taylor's enhanced 'i' protocol, a significant improvement over the standard 'g' protocol used by most UUCP implementations.

UUCP for mail routing

The uucp and uuxqt capabilities could be used to send e-mail between machines, with suitable mail user interface and delivery agent programs. A simple uucp mail address was formed from the adjacent machine name, an exclamation mark An exclamation mark or exclamation point is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and often marks the end of a sentence. Example; "Watch out!" or bang, followed by the user name on the adjacent machine. For example, the address barbox!user would refer to user user on adjacent machine barbox.

Mail could furthermore be routed through the network, traversing any number of intermediate nodes before arriving at its destination. Initially, this had to be done by specifying the complete path, with a list of intermediate host names separated by bangs. For example, if machine barbox is not connected to the local machine, but it is known that barbox is connected to machine foovax which does communicate with the local machine, the appropriate address to send mail to would be foovax!barbox!user.

User barbox!user might publish their UUCP email address in a form such as …!bigsite!foovax!barbox!user. This directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known and well-connected machine accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user user on barbox. Many users would suggest multiple routes from various large well-known sites, providing even better and perhaps faster connection service from the mail sender.

Bang path

An email address of this form was known as a bang path. Bang paths of eight to ten machines (or hops) were not uncommon in 1981, and late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. Some hosts went so far as to try to "rewrite In mathematics, computer science and logic, rewriting covers a wide range of methods of replacing subterms of a formula with other terms. What is considered are rewriting systems (also known as rewrite systems or reduction systems). In their most basic form, they consist of a set of objects, plus relations on how to transform those objects" the path, sending mail via "faster" routes—this practice tended to be frowned upon.

The "pseudo-domain" ending .uucp .uucp was a pseudo-domain-style suffix used in the late 1980s when identifying a hostname not connected directly to the Internet but possibly reachable through inter-network gateways. In this case, it indicated that the hostname preceding it was reachable by UUCP networking. This was one of several apparent "top-level domains" that were was sometimes used to designate a hostname as being reachable by UUCP networking, although this was never formally in the Internet root as a top-level domain A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a fully qualified domain name. For example, in the. This would not have made sense anyway, because the DNS system is only appropriate for hosts reachable directly by TCP/IP. Additionally, uucp as a community administers itself and does not mesh well with the administration methods and regulations governing the DNS; .uucp works where it needs to; some hosts punt mail out of SMTP queue into uucp queues on gateway machines if a .uucp address is recognized on an incoming SMTP connection

UUCPNET and mapping

UUCPNET was the name for the totality of the network of computers connected through UUCP. This network was very informal, maintained in a spirit of mutual cooperation between systems owned by thousands of private companies, universities, and so on. Often, particularly in the private sector, UUCP links were established without official approval from the companies' upper management. The UUCP network was constantly changing as new systems and dial-up links were added, others were removed, etc.

The UUCP Mapping Project was a volunteer, largely successful effort to build a map of the connections between machines that were open mail relays and establish a managed namespace. Each system administrator would submit, by e-mail, a list of the systems to which theirs would connect, along with a ranking for each such connection. These submitted map entries were processed by an automatic program that combined them into a single set of files describing all connections in the network. These files were then published monthly in a newsgroup A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to dedicated to this purpose. The UUCP map files could then be used by software such as "pathalias" to compute the best route path from one machine to another for mail, and to supply this route automatically. The UUCP maps also listed contact information for the sites, and so gave sites seeking to join UUCPNET an easy way to find prospective neighbors.

Connections with the Internet

Many uucp hosts, particularly those at universities, were also connected to the Internet in its early years, and e-mail gateways between Internet SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP was first defined in RFC 821 (STD 15) (1982), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008) which includes the extended SMTP (ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today. SMTP is specified for-based mail and UUCP mail were developed. A user at a system with UUCP connections could thereby exchange mail with Internet users, and the Internet links could be used to bypass large portions of the slow UUCP network. A "UUCP zone" was defined within the Internet domain namespace to facilitate these interfaces.

With this infrastructure in place, UUCP's strength was that it permitted a site to gain Internet e-mail and Usenet connectivity with only a dial-up modem link to another cooperating computer. This was at a time when true Internet access required a leased data line providing a connection to an Internet Point of Presence, both of which were expensive and difficult to arrange. By contrast, a link to the UUCP network could usually be established with a few phone calls to the administrators of prospective neighbor systems. Neighbor systems were often close enough to avoid all but the most basic charges for telephone calls.

Decline

UUCP usage began to die out with the rise of ISPs An Internet service provider , also sometimes referred to as an Internet access provider (IAP), is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet[citation needed]. The ISP connects to its customers using a data transmission technology appropriate for delivering Internet Protocol Paradigm, such as dial-up, DSL, cable modem, wireless or offering inexpensive SLIP and PPP In networking, the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, is a data link protocol commonly used to establish a direct connection between two networking nodes. It can provide connection authentication, transmission encryption privacy, and compression services. The UUCP Mapping Project was formally shut down late in 2000.

The UUCP protocol has now mostly been replaced by the Internet TCP/IP based protocols SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP was first defined in RFC 821 (STD 15) (1982), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008) which includes the extended SMTP (ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today. SMTP is specified for for mail and NNTP The Network News Transfer Protocol is an Internet application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (netnews) between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley authored RFC 977, Usenet news.

Usenet traffic was originally transmitted over the UUCP protocol using bang paths. These are still in use within Usenet message format Path header lines. They now have only an informational purpose, and are not used for routing, although they can be used to ensure that loops do not occur. In general, this form of e-mail address An e-mail address identifies an email box to which e-mail messages may be delivered. An e-mail address on the modern Internet looks like, for example, jsmith@example.com and is usually read as "jsmith at example dot com". Many earlier e-mail systems used different address formats has now been superseded by the "@ The typographic character @, called the at sign or at symbol, is an abbreviation of the word at or the phrase at the rate of in accounting and commercial invoices, e.g. "7 widgets @ $2 = $14". Other names for the symbol—such as amphora, asperand, and monkey tail—have been suggested and occassionally used, but none are in general use notation", even by sites still using UUCP.

Current use and legacy

One surviving feature of uucp is the chat file format, largely inherited by the expect software package.

Uucp is used mainly over high cost links (e.g., marine satellite links).^[4]

UUCP over TCP/IP (often encrypted, using the SSH Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices. Used primarily on GNU/Linux and Unix based systems to access shell accounts, SSH was designed as a replacement for Telnet and other insecure remote shells, which send information, notably passwords, in plaintext, protocol^[2]) can be used when a computer doesn't have any fixed IP addresses An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label that is assigned to devices participating in a computer network, that uses the Internet Protocol for communication between its nodes. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Its role has been characterized as follows: "A but is still willing to run a standard mail transfer agent Within Internet message handling services , a message transfer agent or mail transfer agent (MTA) or mail relay is a computer process or software agent that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another, in single hop application-level transactions. An MTA implements both the client (sending) and server (receiving) portions of (MTA) like Sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and -delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used for email transport over the Internet or Postfix Postfix is a free and open source mail transfer agent , a computer program for the routing and delivery of email. It is intended as a fast, easy-to-administer, and secure alternative to the widely-used Sendmail MTA.

Bang paths are still in use within the Usenet Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post public messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; network, though not for routing; they are used to record the nodes through which a message has passed, rather than to direct where it will go next.

"Bang path" is also used as an expression for any explicitly specified routing path between network hosts. That usage is not necessarly limited to uucp, IP routing, email messaging, or Usenet.

See also

• Routing
• Sitename
• Wizzy Digital Courier—low-cost internet delivery system using UUCP
• FidoNet

References

1. ^ Ian Lance Taylor (June 2003). "UUCP 'f' Protocol". http://www.airs.com/ian/uucp-doc/uucp_7.html#SEC99. Retrieved 2008-08-04.
2. ^ ^{a b} Fabien Penso. "UUCPssh". http://uucpssh.org/. Retrieved 2009-08-09 [dead as on 2010-01-07].
3. ^ Ian Lance Taylor (September 1991). "Beta release of new UUCP package available". http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.uucp/browse_thread/thread/a59ccd63afcade57. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
4. ^ Randolph Bentson (August 1995). "Linux Goes To Sea". http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1111. Retrieved 2009-02-21.

External links

• Using & Managing UUCP. Ed Ravin, Tim O'Reilly, Dale Doughtery, and Grace Todino. 1996, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ISBN 1-56592-153-4
• Mark Horton (1986). RFC 976: UUCP Mail Interchange Format Standard. Internet Engineering Task Force Requests for Comment.
• UUCP Internals Frequently Asked Questions
• Setting up Taylor UUCP + qmail on FreeBSD 5.1
• Taylor UUCP is a GPL licensed UUCP package.
• Taylor UUCP Documentation – useful information about UUCP in general and various uucp protocols.
• The UUCP Project: History
• The UUCP Mapping Project

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