From:	MERC::"uunet!CRVAX.SRI.COM!RELAY-INFO-VAX" 29-SEP-1992 19:00:09.08
To:	info-vax@kl.sri.com
CC:	
Subj:	Re: UCX 2.0

In article <AekpPbO00WB8JV=wtZ@andrew.cmu.edu> Tod McQuillin <tm8t+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>stevem@ms.uky.edu (Stephen McNatton) writes:
>
>I don't have any experience with using LPD or NFS in UCX 2.0, and
>Telnet and FTP seem to work perfectly well both incoming and outgoing.
>But the SMTP mail service is hopelessly broken.  Incoming messages
>were sometimes lost, and the outgoing message queues would freeze up
>and stop transmitting for no apparent reason, with no obvious way to
>restart them, causing hundreds of outgoing mail messages to back up.
>We were on the phone with DEC support over the course of almost two
>weeks; they were unable to resolve the problem.  In fact, the CSC
>suggested we go back to using CMU-TEK and MX, instead of UCX, since
>they could not figure out what was wrong.  They told me they had
>received many other calls from people with the same problem.
>
>So as long as you don't want to use SMTP mail, I guess it would work
>fine, though I never tried the LPD service.
>
>
I wouldn't call it STMP under ucx 2.0 hopeless, but is a tough system to
configure properly.  Its taken me a few weeks only and off to configure it
properly.  A few suggestions:

1) Make sure any mail gateway is in the local host table.  It mentions
   this during the install, but its easy to overlook.

2) Under the configuration for Communications (set/show com) make sure
   that you don't use a fully qualified name for the local (set com/local),
   just the node name.  Then make sure the (set com/domain) domain name is 
   the remainder of your fully qualified name.  Don't confuse this with
   set name/domain which configures and links to name servers.
   For me they are NOT the same.

3) I still have trouble sending to a local site that was using MX (matt
   madisons  mail system).  Someone else posted the possible reason for this.  
   In any case, I used mx_records to route the mail for this node to
   through a local mail server.

4) I had to fiddle with UCX and ucx$inet_set_interfaces.com and then reboot
   to get things straightened out.  Someone mentioned problems with 
   virtual terminals and possible solutions in vmsnet.networks.tcp-ip.ucx.

5) Some friendly types with addresses ending in .dec.com helped me with
   this.  That doesn't mean I know or really understand this.  If you  
   want to flame, send me email.  If it bounces back, you may assume my
   local users are flaming me.

6)  I have used MX 2.3 under UCX 2.0.  Do a stop mail and disable service
    smtp first.  No changes to MX are necessary if you ran it under UCX 1.3a.

IMHO  the fixes to telnet and ftp far outweigh the hassle with STMP.

Jerry S. Weiss	  "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the antimatter!"
j-weiss@nwu.edu    Dept. Medicine, Northwestern Univ. Medical School