[TUHS] uucp protocol nits

Brad Spencer brad at anduin.eldar.org
Sat Mar 11 00:28:46 AEST 2017


Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> writes:

> So if we are going to talk UUCP, how can we not bring up the protocol, and it's beloved behaviour, in certain implementations.
>
> 'g' protocol was what everyone ran. 64 byte packets, in a three packet window.  By default.  But 'g' could really race along, if provoked.  The window could slide up to seven!  Unless you were running Xenix, where that provoked a core dump.  On most systems, increasing the window size meant binary patching uucico.
>
> I fuzzily remember 'g' implementations that could handle packets up to 256 bytes, but I can't remember now if the basic (pre-HDB) UUCP could deal with that.
>
> HDB cleaned up a lot of things.  While complicating the configuration files to no end.
>
> In parallel to all this, Rick Adams was pounding the living daylights out of the BSD UUCP code. That which ran on seismo. Then uunet.
>
> -- uunet!ncc!lyndon  (so many uucp path sigs ...)


Back a long time ago, I ran OS/9 on a 6809E Tandy Color Computer 3.  The
relationship to Unix is that it was obviously inspired by it, especially
Vx where x <= 6 [or perhaps 4 or 5, the block diagrams describing OS/9
could have described the older Unix systems ].  One of the items I
worked on quite extensively was the UUCP implementation.  I didn't write
the original C code reimplementation that it used, but modified it quite
a bit and one of the items I added to it was the ability of the g
protocol to handle a bigger packet window and probably to handle bigger
packets.  At the time I dialed it into UUNET once or twice a day for
email and some very small amount of Usenet news.  This all would have
been in the 1992 - 1994 time frame.  So, ya, the UUCP g protocol could
be fiddled with somewhat and it would likely work.



-- 
Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS
http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]



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