uucp for sneakernet (was Re: Emulating the School...]

[david at lang.hm]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 04, 2008, david at lang.hm wrote:
>>
>> I've used UUCP over TCP/IP as a mail path for systems that only had
>> intermittent network connectivity and it worked very well. if the system
>> can detect when it does have connectivity and connect up to a server every
>> few min while it retains it, it will do a good job of getting the messages
>> through. you don't need to drop down to dialup to make it work, and using
>> uucp avoids reinventing the wheel, intermittent connectivity is what it
>> was designed for, and it doesn't really matter if that connectivity is
>> serial or TCP/IP.
>
> Did anyone ever publicly extend UUCP to handle "multicast" messages over
> broadcast media, like satellite?
>
> I did something similar years ago for usenet (as did a lot of other folk)
> and I'm sure being able to broadcast objects across satellite would be
> very very useful for the project.
>
> I've got plenty of IP/services over Satellite experience here, so I'm happy
> to help however i can. Its just been a while since I had access to the end
> node hardware, and stuff has changed quite a bit in the 10 years since I
> touched it. :)

the good news is that you can simulate things by useing UDP broadcast 
packets as your transport layer.

don't get fixated on the idea of using satellites, as a means for 
publishing updates a high-powered AM or SSB station can blanket a large 
area, and the efficiancy gained by only transmitting things a couple times 
(including error correction to deal with missed packets) instead of once 
to each destination can counter the drawback of a low bit rate.

David Lang