Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Chapter 16. Managing Taylor UUCP

UUCP was designed in the late seventies by Mike Lesk at AT&T Bell Laboratories to provide a simple dialup network over public telephone lines. Despite the popularity of dialup PPP and SLIP connections to the Internet, many people who want to have email and Usenet News on their home machine still use UUCP because it is often cheaper, especially in countries where Internet users have to pay by the minute for local telephone calls, or where they do not have a local ISP and must pay long distance toll rates to connect. Although there are many implementations of UUCP running on a wide variety of hardware platforms and operating systems, overall, they are highly compatible.

However, as with most software that has somehow become “standard” over the years, there is no UUCP that one would call the UUCP. It has undergone a steady evolution since the first version was implemented in 1976. Currently, there are two major species that differ mainly in their hardware support and configuration. Of these two, various implementations exist, each varying slightly from its siblings.

One species is known as Version 2 UUCP, which dates back to a 1977 implementation by Mike Lesk, David A. Novitz, and Greg Chesson. Although it is fairly old, it is still frequently used. Recent implementations of Version 2 provide much of the comfort that the newer UUCP species do.

The second species was developed in 1983 and is commonly referred to as BNU (Basic Networking Utilities) or HoneyDanBer ...