Calling all oldheads who worked with UUCP. I was flipping through an old O'Reilly book of mine and found this. Being younger, I never used UUCP, so forgive me if I understand poorly, but basically UUNET, as an ISP, had publicly accessible UUCP servers that they treated like FTP, correct?
That's cool and all, but what I wanna know is if there's any more such services available these days. I'm fascinated by UUCP and need an excuse to try it.
Hackaday's latest Forgotten Internet feature is on UUCP.
@neil I ran my own #email server for about 25 years, from about 1994 to 2019. In the early days it ran on #UUCP even.
I stopped because:
1) Email had become too critical, and if I was away and offline or something and the server went down or had issues, I didn't want to lose mail
2) It took too much time to maintain, in BOTH directions.
1/
Today I spent my day fiddling with my #uucp configuration, and the chat script still is driving me mad. Uucp sends carriage returns it shouldn't and randomly decides documented escape characters are something completely unknown.
One idea I had was a network of publicly accessible #SBC-based forums based on newsgroups that connect with each other via #uucp running on carrier phones. i.e. messages get carried around between different nodes of that network by phones nearby that that come by and exchange messages periodically. I was thinking one easily could hide this kind of device in another object, power it by solar, and provide an under-the-radar forum for people in a specific place, e.g. a workplace or school.
@kyonshi This is one reason that I mostly use #NNCP instead of #UUCP these days. There are some use cases where UUCP is *perfect*. For instance, long-distance, low-power, low-speed radios such as #LoRa or #XBeeSX. LoRa has speeds similar to the modems UUCP used back in the day, and it can be quite useful for that. But nowadays, nicer support for USB drives and encryption is a win.
I mentioned in my new introduction that I am interested in #uucp, and I thought I should get into this a bit more.
uucp is technically only a unix tool, or maybe toolset, that came around very early in computing (first proper release in '79), to help with early network connections.
The abbreviation is for unix-to-unix-copy, and that's exactly what it does: it copies files between different systems 1/?
@kyonshi Welcome! I was sort of half-consciously scrolling along, and then all of a sudden my brain went, "Wait, what? Did I see #UUCP in that list? Why yes I did!" Hello, fello human that knows what UUCP and Usenet are! I have been running UUCP (and its successor #NNCP) off and on for 30 years. I have a page at https://www.complete.org/uucp/ and there's https://www.complete.org/nncp/ about NNCP. Curious what you are doing with UUCP and who you connect to. Also I offer Usenet feeds via NNCP.
My old #introduction got lost somewhere
German, he/him, 40s, living in Poland (#lodz). I work in IT and do some geeky computer stuff on the side (#usenet, #uucp, #irc)
My main hobby are #ttrpgs (#osr #dnd, #traveller, #shadowrun) and similar (#minipainting, #boardgames) but I also do writing and reading (#fantasy, #sf) and #cooking
I will be complaining about #kids, #cats, lack of #coffee, and the general state of the world
I do get weirdly obsessed with topics sometimes. But don't we all?
which means our small #uucp net looks roughly like this now...
what I want to find is someone else to connect my #uucp system to. unfortunately everybody that was interested in the technology seems to have given up.
spent entirely too much time reading documentation for #uucp to figure out if you can send requests to list files in another system's public folder
result: beats me
Working on my #uucp connections between laptop and rpi. For some reason my Linux notebook just doesn't reach the rpi via uucp, and it doesn't make any sense at all.
@screwtape @ellenor2000 Not necessarily per se, it's really only once one has both #P2P and #AsynchronousCommunication that things get very interesting.
Unreliable uptime also isn't quite the asynchronicity I refer to (https://www.complete.org/asynchronous-communication/). Rather, I'm referring to a system developed with no expectation of ever having a low-latency route to the end destination at all.
#Usenet is your classical example. Use #UUCP (#NNCP now) or mailed floppies to update your spool. It's supported.
@vga256 Would the creation of modern #UUCP tools help?
One of my design goals — which may differ from yours — is "federation by any means necessary" including off-grid newsgroups over ham radio with full support for posting via sneakernet.
I'm happy to share my UUCP code, once I've written it, if it will be useful to someone else. Taylor UUCP, the most commonly available UUCP package, is ancient being a mix of ANSI and K&R #C code, and has a TODO list a mile long.
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
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