UUCP was designed in the late seventies by Mike Lesk at AT&T Bell Laboratories to provide a simple dial-up network over public telephone lines. Since most people that want to have email and Usenet News on their home machine still communicate through modems, UUCP has remained very popular. Although there are many implementations running on a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems, they are compatible to a high degree.
However, as with most software that has somehow become ``standard'' over the years, there is no UUCP which one would call the UUCP. It has undergone a steady process of evolution since the first version which was implemented in 1976. Currently, there are two major species which differ mainly in their support of hardware and their configuration. Of these, various implementations exist, each varying slightly from its siblings.
One species is the so-called ``Version 2 UUCP'', which dates back to a 1977 implementation by Mike Lesk, David A. Novitz, and Greg Chesson. Although it is fairly old, it is still in frequent use. Recent implementations of Version 2 provide much of the comfort of the newer UUCP species.
The second species was developed in 1983, and is commonly referred to as BNU (Basic Networking Utilities), HoneyDanBer UUCP, or HDB for short. The name is derived from the authors' names, P.-Honeyman, D.-A.-Novitz, and B.-E.-Redman. HDB was conceived to eliminate some of Version 2 UUCP's deficiencies. For example, new transfer protocols were added, and the spool directory was split so that now there is one directory for each site you have UUCP traffic with.
The implementation of UUCP currently distributed with is Taylor
UUCP-1.04,
which is the version this chapter is based upon. Taylor UUCP Version
1.04 was released in February 1993. Apart from traditional
configuration files, Taylor UUCP may also be compiled to understand the
new-style-- a.k.a. ``Taylor''-- configuration files.
Version 1.05 has been released recently, and will soon make its way into most distributions. The differences between these versions mostly affect features you will never use, so you should be able to configure Taylor UUCP-1.05 using the information form this book.
As included in most distributions, Taylor UUCP is usually compiled for BNU compatibility, or the Taylor configuration scheme, or both. As the latter is much more flexible, and probably easier to understand than the often rather obscure BNU configuration files, I will describe the Taylor scheme below.
The purpose of this chapter is not to give you an exhaustive description
of what the command line options for the UUCP commands are and what they
do, but to give you an introduction on how to set up a working UUCP
node. The first section gives a hopefully gentle introduction about how
UUCP implements remote execution and file transfers. If you are not
entirely new to UUCP, you might want to skip this and move on to
section-
, which explains the various files used
to set up UUCP.
We will however assume that you are familiar with the user programs of the UUCP suite. These are uucp and uux. For a description, please refer to the on-line manual pages.
Besides the publicly accessible programs, uux and uucp, the UUCP suite contains a number of commands used for administrative purposes only. They are used to monitor UUCP traffic across your node, remove old log files, or compile statistics. None of these will be described here, because they're peripheral to the main tasks of UUCP. Besides, they're well documented and fairly easy to understand. However, there is a third category, which comprises the actual UUCP ``work horses''. They are called uucico (where cico stands for copy-in copy-out), and uuxqt, which executes jobs sent from remote systems.