#uucp — Public Fediverse posts

Протокол UUCP

Дело было в девяностых годах прошлого века. Время беспокойное. Страна развалилась, люди обеднели, многие пытались уехать за границу. Особенно успешно отъезды получались у девушек, которые находили заграничных женихов. На этой ниве процветали брачные агентства, которые помогали с перепиской и оформлением документов. Но некоторые девушки пытались решить такие проблемы самостоятельно. И вот, ко мне обратилась за помощью одна знакомая. Хочу, говорит, вести переписку без агентства. Нужен компьютер и интернет. - Хорошо, отвечаю - а какие требования к компьютеру? - Чтобы письма писать можно было… - А в игрушки играть, фильмы смотреть? - Не надо… Только письма… - Может, еще какие требования? - Чтобы недорогой был… Совсем недорогой… Техническое задание понял, начал действовать. И нашел! Совсем недорогой ( точнее – бесплатный) компьютер, Amstrad PC1512, 1986 года выпуска. Компьютер стоял без дела в бухгалтерии строительной компании. Компания уже перешла на Windows и такой антиквариат им был не нужен. Я помог бухгалтерии списать компьютер и отнес его к своей знакомой. Включаю… Грузится DOS… Нахожу и запускаю Лексикон ( текстовый процессор ). Ну, теперь можно написать письмо! Написать письмо можно, а как отправить? Модема нету… Придется искать. Пока можно проверить, ответит ли dial-up сервер. Нахожу в записной книжке телефон сервера. Снимаю трубку телефона, кручу дисковый номеронабиратель. Сервер отвечает, свистит. Тоже посвистываю – слышит, меняет тональность, хочет поговорить. Но я по-ихнему не умею, кладу трубку. протокол UUCP

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1035350/

#uucp #модем #история_it

@atarifrosch @alios Zu #UUCP-Zeiten habe ich mir die ersten Webseiten per E-Mail zuschicken lassen. Von einem Gateway in Jena, der schon dieses TCP/IP konnte. Hat pro Webseite roundtrip ca. 3 Tage gedauert.

Just stumbled on this tonight looking around for information on UUCP. So, my loony idea at the moment, is to see if I can funnel UUCP over AX.25 packet radio, with the idea that I can send email over that.

My principle gripe right now is that most UUCP implementations (I've dealt with SCO UUCP and Taylor UUCP) require you to list up-front, all the nodes you might want to talk to… but aside from that limitation, the technology choice seems sound on paper.

Here, a group has managed to make UUCP talk over ARDOP.
https://www.rhizomatica.org/hermes/

ARDOP has its own problems, but that project looks interesting in what they've achieved. They're using conventional Icom HF radios to provide both text, recorded voice and photo transmission between communities in the Amazon (the rainforest not the megacorp).

#AmateurRadio #ARDOP #UUCP #PacketRadio

🧵

Do you wonder how email and Usenet worked on the internet before always-on lines between the servers?

There was a Unix program called UUCP, which was used to syncronise data between the servers at night using telephone lines.

You wrote a Usenet message during the day and "posted" it. That message got synced to the federated Usenet network during the night, and the recipient of that Usenet message got it tomorrow morning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

#UUCP #Unix #RetroComputing #Usenet

@R1Rail @genma @bortzmeyer : On ressort les vieux modems, et on relance le bon vieux « #Usenet over #UUCP » ?

Wow hey apparently #FreeBSD has 3D-accelerated #UUCP via their fancy new desktop-oriented installer?

They will be able to render bang-paths at impossible speed, but will it be 8-bit clean?

Some ancient history

I first began using internet email in 1986 or 1987. I was listed in UUCP maps as a system administrator by June 1987 and by January 1988 the UUCP maps were distributed by USENET.

Here is a USENET post for all of the UUCP connected machines in Oklahoma: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/search?q=u.usa.ok%20john%20moyer%20after%3A1987-01-01%20before%3A1991-12-01

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP
"
User barbox!user would generally publish their UUCP email address in a form such as …!bigsite!foovax!barbox!user.
"
#Unix #UUCP #Usenet #email #history #internet

...
I don't have any mail archives from that period (for obvious reasons), but maybe somebody can remember.

What I'm specifically trying to pinpoint is when we started registering CH domains for UUCP sites, it doesn't seem this was announced anywhere that has survived the not quite 4 decades and maybe we just sent a mail at the time. So the UUCP maps might be the only way to at least roughly date it.

#EUnet #UUCP #Nostalgia

Distracted by #uucp.

@kelbot I'll also call out #UUCP. It was one of the last 2 large-scale asynchronous communication methods we had (the last being email, which still survives in that form). Could talk over anything. #NNCP is a worthy successor and, while it doesn't do modems, it does do #encryption and USB drives.

Le sachiez-tu : sur le site Web d'Oracle, une des plus riches boites d'informatique du monde, il y a la documentation pour #UUCP : https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24843_01/html/E22298/uucpov-1.html

« UUCP permet aux ordinateurs de transférer des fichiers et d'échanger des messages électroniques entre eux. » Ça a l'air drôlement bien, ce truc, faudra que j'essaie.

Interesting Retro Technology from times long past.

Data signalling cables RS232 serial DB9 to DB25

Cables like this were used on high speed modems like Telebit 9600BPS MNP5 Fax modem with which my country held it's Communications with upr2.clu.net talking purely UUCP.

#RS232 #RetroComputing #RetroTechnology #serial #115200bps #AT #ATX3DT #ATA #UUCP

@geerlingguy is #meshtastic store and forward? If so it's as secure as bang path #uucp email

@usul @lwn I like to say "#NNCP is to #UUCP as #ssh is to telnet". That is, NNCP adds modern encryption and a lot more flexibility, while dropping UUCP's modem focus.

If you really do need to use modems, NNCP is more flexible than UUCP in how you get data in and out of it, and it is certainly possible to transport NNCP using UUCP. (Vice-versa is more difficult because UUCP has no API for this)

1/

finally managed to get #nntp connections running on my little #usenet server. The snag turned out to be a setting I had turned off specifically because I wanted to have a #uucp-only machine.

Oh well, now some groups (#ttrpg ones that is) update instantly because the single nntp connection I have is @kensanata's campaignwiki.org server.

In the end I took the plunge and decided that maybe having #nntp connections is not all that bad for our #uucp network.

Mostly because despite the beautiful simplicity of the protocol, actually getting uucp to work on modern machines is a whole different matter. It really is made for a dial-up world.

Also we don't actually have all that much traffic on our network to begin with, considering #usenet is kinda... I don't want to write dead, but it if it was a body it might start smelling soon.

Usenet – то, что было до веб

Сейчас трудно представить Интернет без веб и гипертекста, которыми все мы пользуемся каждый день, но более 40 лет назад глобальная сеть была совсем другой и многое из того, чем мы сейчас пользуемся, тогда еще только зарождалось. Сегодня мы продолжим рассказывать о славных технологиях прошлого и вспомним сеть Usenet.

https://habr.com/ru/companies/aeza/articles/920566/

#usenet #мейнфрейм #диалап #uucp

NNCPNET email: Atavistic project to bring back old style UUCP email but with modern protocols and tools
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10768-announcing-the-nncpnet-email-network
#networking #internet #history #email #uucp #nncp #+

My new blog post, Memoirs of the Early #Internet, unearths a few relics of the early Internet and #UUCP days from some obscure sites.

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10792-memoirs-of-the-early-internet

Researching cool things a person can do with #asynchronous #email over #NNCP (#NNCPNET) led me down that path. So while you're there, you can also check out the post about the NNCPNET Internet email gateway. https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10783-nncpnet-can-optionally-exchange-internet-email

Memoirs of the Early Internet

The Internet is an amazing place, and occasionally you can find things on the web that have somehow lingered online for decades longer than you might expect.

Today I’ll take you on a tour of some parts of the early Internet.

The Internet, of course, is a “network of networks” and part of its early (and continuing) promise was to provide a common protocol that all sorts of networks can use to interoperate with each other. In the early days, UUCP was one of the main ways universities linked with each other, and eventually UUCP and the Internet sort of merged (but that’s a long story).

Let’s start with some Usenet maps, which were an early way to document the UUCP modem links between universities. Start with this PDF. The first page is a Usenet map (which at the time mostly flowed over UUCP) from April of 1981. Notice that ucbvax, a VAX system at Berkeley, was central to the map.

ucbvax continued to be a central node for UUCP for more than a decade; on page 5 of that PDF, you’ll see that it asks for a “Path from a major node (eg, ucbvax, devcax, harpo, duke)”. Pre-Internet email addresses used a path; eg, mark@ucbvax was duke!decvax!ucbvax!mark to someone. You had to specify the route from your system to the recipient on your email To line. If you gave out your email address on a business card, you would start it from a major node like ucbvax, and the assumption was that everyone would know how to get from their system to the major node.

On August 19, 1994, ucbvax was finally turned off. TCP/IP had driven UUCP into more obscurity; by then, it was mostly used by people without a dedicated Internet connection to get on the Internet, rather than an entire communication network of its own. A few days later, Cliff Frost posted a memoir of ucbvax; an obscurbe bit of Internet lore that is fun to read.

UUCP was ad-hoc, and by 1984 there was an effort to make a machine-parsable map to help automate routing on UUCP. This was called the pathalias project, and there was a paper about it. The Linux network administration guide even includes a section on pathalias.

Because UUCP mainly flowed over phone lines, long distance fees made it quite expensive. In 1985, the Stargate Project was formed, with the idea of distributing Usenet by satellite. The satellite link was short-lived, but the effort eventually morphed into UUNET. It was initially a non-profit, but eventually became a commercial backbone provider, and later ISP. Over a long series of acquisitions, UUNET is now part of Verizon. An article in ;login: is another description of this history.

IAPS has an Internet in 1990 article, which includes both pathalias data and an interesting map of domain names to UUCP paths.

As I was pondering what interesting things a person could do with NNCPNET Internet email, I stumbled across a page on getting FTP files via e-mail. Yes, that used to be a thing! I remember [email protected].

It turns out that page is from a copy of EFF’s (Extended) Guide to the Internet from 1994. Wow, what a treasure! It has entries such as A Slice of Life in my Virtual Community, libraries with telnet access, Gopher, A Statement of Principle by Bruce Sterling, and I could go on. You can also get it as a PDF from Internet Archive.

UUCP is still included with modern Linux and BSD distributions. It was part of how I experienced the PC and Internet revolution in rural America. It lacks modern security, but NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet.

#history #Internet #uucp

#uucp and #nncp are very complex beasts but very interesting to poke around with however, trying to run a #Usenet through it or #email server is a pain in the ass

Announcing the NNCPNET Email Network

From 1995 to 2019, I ran my own mail server. It began with a UUCP link, an expensive long-distance call for me then. Later, I ran a mail server in my apartment, then ran it as a VPS at various places.

But running an email server got difficult. You can’t just run it on a residential IP. Now there’s SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and TLS to worry about. I recently reviewed mail hosting services, and don’t get me wrong: I still use one, and probably will, because things like email from my bank are critical.

But we’ve lost the ability to tinker, to experiment, to have fun with email.

Not anymore. NNCPNET is an email system that runs atop NNCP. I’ve written a lot about NNCP, including a less-ambitious article about point-to-point email over NNCP 5 years ago. NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet: a modernization, with modern security and features. NNCP is an asynchronous, onion-routed, store-and-forward network. It can use as a transport anything from the Internet to a USB stick.

NNCPNET is a set of standards, scripts, and tools to facilitate a broader email network using NNCP as the transport. You can read more about NNCPNET on its wiki!

The “easy mode” is to use the Docker container (multi-arch, so you can use it on your Raspberry Pi) I provide, which bundles:

• Exim mail server
• NNCP
• Verification and routing tools I wrote. Because NNCP packets are encrypted and signed, we get sender verification “for free”; my tools ensure the From: header corresponds with the sending node.
• Automated nodelist tools; it will request daily nodelist updates and update its configurations accordingly, so new members can be communicated with
• Integration with the optional, opt-in Internet email bridge

It is open to all. The homepage has a more extensive list of features.

I even have mailing lists running on NNCPNET; see the interesting addresses page for more details.

There is extensive documentation, and of course the source to the whole thing is available.

The gateway to Internet SMTP mail is off by default, but can easily be enabled for any node. It is a full participant, in both directions, with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and TLS.

You don’t need any inbound ports for any of this. You don’t need an always-on Internet connection. You don’t even need an Internet connection at all. You can run it from your laptop and still use Thunderbird to talk to it via its optional built-in IMAP server.

#email #nncp #uucp

#UUCP was probably the first #socialmedia in the world. But with real friends since you would have to know the correct route to him/her. 😆

https://hackaday.com/2025/01/16/forgotten-internet-uucp/

@codemonkeymike I've even found people interested in my obscure asynchronous communication interests like #NNCP and #UUCP. Twitter was never great for less popular things and got worse over time as it tried to boost the popular.

#Mastodon is the closest thing I've seen to a 90s #BBS, and this is a compliment.

You can also follow hashtags here, so any post by any person that is followed by anybody on your instance with that hashtag will show up in your feed. 2/

… I have seen things you wouldn’t believe …

… ribbon cables for hard drives… Master/Slave #SCSI termination… (mind screams in rebellion)… the little switch boxes to hook your original #Nintendo console or #VIC20 to a TV and then get headaches from staring at the TV CRT too closely…. a VIC-20 cassette drive with a box of about 150+ unlabeled tapes… painstakingly typed in from the listings in #BYTE magazines… Taking low-density 3.5″ floppies, and drilling/punching a hole through to double your storage and make them “high-density”…. the squeal of a modem (and trying to get the #IRQ conflicts resolved via changing jumper switches)… attempting to connect to #Datapac to try and reach unknown systems, running a #BBS inside a #DOS box, on #386(SX) #Windows 3.0 machine, Setting up your own #UUCP #internet over #dialup…

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…

The clicking of an #IOMEGA #ZIP drive, whose time it was to die…

@trevorflowers @SHODAN

Yes, we did have a lot of fun. patching in hardware, enhancing machine code, using things like the CONIX overlay to CP/M which gave limited (very limited) unix functionality. Setting up the first dial up public access internet site in Tassy. calvados.apana.org.au on an XT.

You will *never* have that much fun with IT/IS now.

#memories #uucp #HCF #CONIX #CPM

@stevelord @kas Incidentally, a second alternative along those lines would be to use #gensio to provide a reliable connection over an unreliable medium, and then use #nncp's nncp-daemon/nncp-call atop gensio.

I have thought about all this when I've considered running over #LoRA or #XBee SX links. In particular, in xbnet, I documented some #UUCP settings: https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet/blob/master/doc/xbnet.1.md#uucp

I haven't directly tried the NNCP-over-UUCP scenario, but I do think it should be fairly straightforward.

2/

How to tunnel NNCP over: #S3 #Nextcloud #Owncloud #WebDAV #ssh #tor #LoRA #Xbee #SFTP and #UUCP - https://floss.social/@jgoerzen/106786433628981477

My 12-yr-old decides to write an operating system and learn C. https://floss.social/@jgoerzen/106871449955753762

I offer #Usenet feeds over #NNCP. https://floss.social/@jgoerzen/106891544884588818

#Yggdrasil, the end-to-end encrypted #Mesh network that needs zero infra. https://floss.social/@jgoerzen/107584885919420001

Tools that work #Offline with #NoInternet. https://floss.social/@jgoerzen/107884945439834995

An addendum - if you have a phone line and #modem, #UUCP can get through just about anything. #ZModem too. These older protocols lack modern security themselves, but will deal with slow and noisy #serial links well. #XBee SX radios provide a serial link they can use.

@stibbons I actually use #NNCP quite a bit (and used #UUCP back in the day also). Unlike UUCP, NNCP assumes a clean connection - a reasonable assumption for most these days. Actually one of my use cases for this would be running NNCP over this kind of link. The NNCP author's canonical suggestion for NNCP over serial is to use TCP over PPP. That works fine to provide reliability, but has too much overhead for these very slow #XBee modems. https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp

How you can tunnel #NNCP over: #S3 #Nextcloud #Owncloud #WebDAV #ssh #tor #LoRA #Xbee #SFTP and even #UUCP: https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/tunneling.org

Oh, and #IPFS will probably work too

@ajroach42 Followed the #mBBS hashtag to some posts on your blog. You and I are definitely interested in some similar things. (I ran a #BBS back in the day, on both #FidoNet and #UUCP, so this stuff all rings true). If you ever used UUCP, NNCP is basically modern UUCP... or sort of UUCP+ssh+tor in a way. It's the ssh of async, a generic building block. Heck, you can nncp-exec to sh if you really want, maybe with a little wrapper to send you back your results.

@ctonysem Yes! So on #hamradio bands in the US, encryption isn't allowed, but AX.25 (packet radio) works at 1200bps on VHF or 300bps HF and I have definitely run emacs over that 🙂

For true #ssh, I use #LoRA and #XBee devices. I wrote https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet to facilitate TCP/IP (or ssh) over XBee - my most advanced work in this area - and https://github.com/jgoerzen/lorapipe for a similar thing over LoRA.

I can run #ssh, #TCP, #PPP, #UUCP, even #Ethernet over long-range radio with xbnet!

"IT-Sicherheitskennzeichen"
#NochSonSchenkelKlopfer

BSI soll Frühwarnsystem für Hackerangriffe aufbauen
https://www.golem.de/news/datenleak-bsi-soll-fruehwarnsystem-fuer-hackerangriffe-aufbauen-1901-138597.html

"Seehofer, der nach eigenen Angaben "seit den 80er Jahren" im Internet unterwegs ist"
#EchtJetzt? #Seehofer per #UUCP im #Usenet? Ich kann mir den so schwer am #Telnet oder #FTP vorstellen..