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UUCP stands for Unix to Unix CoPy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. Computer programs (also software programs, or just programs) are instructions for a Computer. In the field of Telecommunications, a communications protocol is the set of standard rules for data representation signaling authentication and error detection required to A computer file is a block of Arbitrary Information, or resource for storing information which is available to a Computer program and is usually Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email, or originally eMail, is a Store-and-forward method of writing sending receiving Usenet, a Portmanteau of "user" and "network" is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system A computer is a Machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. 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, UUCP implementations exist for several other operating systems, including Microsoft's MS-DOS, Digital's VAX/VMS, Commodore's AmigaOS, and Mac OS. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer MS-DOS (short for M icro' s' oft D isk O perating S ystem is an Operating system commercialized by Microsoft. Open Virtual Memory System ( OpenVMS) initially known just as Virtual Memory System ( VMS) is the name of a High-end Computer server AmigaOS is the default native Operating system of the Amiga personal computer Mac OS is the trademarked name for a series of Graphical user interface -based Operating systems developed by Apple Inc

Contents

Technology

UUCP can use several different types of physical connections and link-layer protocols, but was most commonly used over dial-up connections. Before the widespread availability of Internet connectivity, computers were only connected by smaller private networks within a company or organization. The Internet is a global system of interconnected Computer networks They were also often equipped with modems so they could be used remotely from character-mode terminals via dial-up lines. Modem (from mo dulator- dem odulator is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode Digital information 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 (commonly TCP/IP) is the set of Communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks

One example of the current use of UUCP is in the retail industry by Epicor CRS Retail Systems[1] for transferring batch files between corporate and store systems via TCP and dial-up on SCO OpenServer, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft Windows (with Cygwin). Epicor ( develops a range of enterprise Software solutions targeted at midmarket companies primarily in the manufacturing distribution retail hospitality and services industries The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. SCO OpenServer, previously SCO UNIX and SCO Open Desktop ( SCO ODT) is a closed source version of the Unix computer Operating system Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Cygwin (ˈsɪɡwɪn is a collection of tools originally developed by Cygnus Solutions to provide in Microsoft Windows a command line and programming interface familiar 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 to dialup, and persistent queue management. However, this technology is anticipated to be retired in favor of other alternatives.

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 UUCP. Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is the Research organization Michael E Lesk is an American Computer programmer. In the 1960s Michael Lesk worked for the SMART project wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV (and usually pronounced though rarely written as System 5 was one of the versions of the Unix Operating system The original UUCP was rewritten by AT&T researchers Peter Honeyman, David A. 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. 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"). All of these versions had security holes which allowed some of the original internet worms to remotely execute unexpected shell commands, which inspired Ian Lance Taylor to write a new version from scratch. A computer worm is a self-replicating Computer program. It uses a network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computer terminals on the network and it may do so without Taylor UUCP was released under the GNU General Public License and became the most stable and bug free version. 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 operating systems, most-notably MS-DOS systems. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Packages such as UUSLAVE/GNUCICO (John Gilmore, Garry Paxinos, Tim Pozar), UUPC (Drew Derbyshire) and FSUUCP (Christopher Ambler), brought early Internet connectivity to personal computers, expanding the network beyond the interconnected university systems. FSUUCP formed the basis for many BBS packages such as Galacticomm's Major BBS and Mustang Software's Wildcat! BBS to connect to the UUCP network and exchange email and Usenet traffic. The Major BBS (later renamed Worldgroup in 1995 was developed by Tim Stryker and launched in 1986 by Stryker's company Galacticomm, as a demonstration Mustang Software Inc was a California-based corporation that developed telecommunications software products Wildcat! is a Bulletin board system (BBS Software package developed in 1986 by Mustang Software to create a dial-up BBS operating under Usenet, a Portmanteau of "user" and "network" is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system 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.

One surviving feature of uucp is the chat file format, largely inherited by the expect software package. Expect is a Unix automation and testing tool written by Don Libes as an extension to the Tcl scripting language for interactive applications

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 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 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" the path, sending mail via "faster" routes — this practice tended to be frowned upon. In Mathematics, Computer science and Logic, rewriting covers a wide range of potentially non-deterministic methods of replacing subterms of a

The "pseudo-domain" ending .uucp 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.

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. An open mail relay is an SMTP server configured in such a way that it allows anyone on the Internet to send E-mail through it not just mail destined 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 dedicated to this purpose. A newsgroup is a Repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from many users in different locations 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-based mail and UUCP mail were developed. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ( SMTP) is a De facto standard for electronic mail (e-mail transmissions across the Internet. 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. Usenet, a Portmanteau of "user" and "network" is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system 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 offering inexpensive SLIP and PPP services. An Internet service provider ( ISP, also called Internet access provider or IAP) is a company which primarily offers their customers access to the Internet The Serial Line Internet Protocol ( SLIP) is a mostly Obsolete encapsulation of the Internet Protocol designed to work over Serial ports In networking, the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, is a data link protocol commonly used to establish a direct connection between two nodes The UUCP Mapping Project was formally shut down in late 2000.

Usenet traffic was originally transmitted using the UUCP network, and bang paths are still in use within Usenet message format Path header lines. Usenet, a Portmanteau of "user" and "network" is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system 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 has now been superseded by the SMTP "@ notation", even by sites still using uucp. An e-mail address identifies a location to which E-mail messages can be delivered Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ( SMTP) is a De facto standard for electronic mail (e-mail transmissions across the Internet. The typographic character @, the at sign, denotes a pan-lingual abbreviation of the word 'at'

Currently UUCP is used mainly over high cost links (e. g. , marine satellite links). UUCP over TCP/IP (preferably encrypted, such as via the SSH protocol) can be used when a computer doesn't have any fixed IP addresses but is still willing to run a standard mail transfer agent (MTA) like Sendmail or Postfix. Secure Shell or SSH is a Network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a Secure channel between two networked devices An Internet Protocol ( IP) address is a numerical identification ( Logical address) that is assigned to devices participating in a Computer network A mail transfer agent (MTA (also called a mail transport agent, message transfer agent, or smtpd (short for SMTP daemon) is a Sendmail is a Mail transfer agent (MTA that supports many kinds of mail transfer and delivery including the overwhelmingly popular SMTP. Postfix is a free open source Mail transfer agent (MTA a Computer program for the routing and delivery of Email.

See also

External links

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