Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

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I ran UUCP well into the 2010s. Starting around 1999 I was running a small company and we all had laptops as our primary machines. Remember, back then Internet was fairly spotty: Still dial up, CDMA 9600bps cellular, Richochet, PCMCIA, BreezeNet...

UUCP with qmail and later Postfix was a great way to shove e-mail over these really unreliable connections. The g protocol worked amazingly well over these unreliable connections because it could pick up where it left off, so as long as you could get a few packets through, eventually your (sometimes large) e-mail messages could make it through, even if they had the spend the night trying.

The company kept that architecture well into the 2010s, even when we all had fairly speedy, reliable Internet connections, because it just worked really well. They eventually went to gmail years after I left.

I will always have a fondness for UUCP. I eventually moved to qmail (a bit hacked up to handle for some unusual requirements) for all the UUCP related stuff.

UUCP had it's issues, but it was (and still is) one of the best was to transfer stuff over really bad connections. We worked at a place where we had really remote locations and UUCP stuff worked without much work.

Plus, I learned a ton in writing something to do reports and monitoring of the UUCP connections. Fun times, but I am still scarred Sendmail. Some wounds are pretty deep.

Back circa 1994, I was getting e-mail by dialing in to the Boulder Internet Coop via UUCP. They were really experienced Unix folks (Trent Hein, Evi Nemeth RIP), running Sun. At one point, the uucp queue got big enough (I believe from machines that were connecting infrequently or maybe not at all), that the directory holding all those files couldn't be scanned in less than the UUCP timeout. All the while I was paying long distance rates (remember those) to sit on the line idling.

I had recommended they switch to using Taylor UUCP, because it splits the queue directory up into a hierarchy. They said Taylor wasn't mature enough, but I asked Ian Lance Taylor about it and he laughed and said "<THE major commercial UUCP provider> doesn't seem to agree." :-)

I've always heard that Kermit has really great protocols for handling horribly, horribly bad modem connections. I had at times wondered if a kermit UUCP protocol would have been useful.

Kermit could be pretty good. Used it for VMS stuff for quite a bit. Really lost track of it when I moved to mainly Unix setups.

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