A UUCP blast from the past? What's next?

Question

OK -- put on your 70s bell bottoms, and step into the WayBack machine for this.... disco lives again folks.... (And I doubt there's a tag for this...)

I need the successor to UUCP. For you kids out there, before the Internet, and after the Bysyncian Era, we had to have e-mail and file transfer on Unix machines. (rec.humor.funny doesn't get around by itself you know...) Great tribes of SysAdmins would fire up their telebit trailblazers and push mail and files from machine to machine via the "Bang path". (I was ...!crash!jack!wolf!soft21!jantypas if anyone can decipher the ancient symbols... PC Pursuit forever!) We did this because all we had were asynchronous phone calls -- none of that fancy always on ARPANet.... or those kids with BITNet....

Believe it or not, there are still places in the world that don't have always on Internet or its expensive enough that we can't keep it up more than an hour or two a night. Think of schools in very remote areas....

What's the successor? Is there a successor? Can I use something like Jabber if I can get Jabber to hold messages and pass them node to node as the links come up? Any ideas?

I don't need the phone modem part -- TCP/IP is fine, but these are for rural schools in Nigeria where we're lucky to have electric power for a few hours, let alone solid bandwidth. UUCP allowed me to poll and exchange in both directions during the poll event.

And in honor of the greats...

A host is a host from coast to coast And no one will connect with a host that's close Unless the host hat isn't close Is busy, hung or dead

Answer 1

Great question! :)

A quick search suggests Taylor UUCP, which can make UUCP links over TCP connections. I got this from here and here, which suggest UUCP over TCP. The former also mentions NNTP as another option if your latency isn't too bad.

Edit bandie's UUCP page, which I just discovered.

Answer 2

On a default Ubuntu installation:

$ uucp
The program 'uucp' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt install uucp
$ sudo apt install uucp
$ uucp --help
Taylor UUCP 1.07, copyright (C) 1991, 92, 93, 94, 1995, 2002 Ian Lance Taylor
Usage: uucp [options] file1 [file2 ...] dest
...

You can now use UUCP! Taylor UUCP is available for download as mentioned in the other answer and can be built for Windows.

Answer 3

I still maintain 10 servers running UUCP for maritime data transfer in a hub/spoke configuration. I'm using OpenSuse, all virtualized, in a Taylor UUCP configuration. It handles mail server to mail server transfer as well as some other critical items.

My biggest challenge is setting up reliable encryption. I've tried openssl -sclient as well as stunnel. The transfer works in one direction, but times out after two minutes when traffic reverses (master/slave reversal). I can't figure this one out. Obviously it's at the encryption layer that the timeout occurs.

<adding additional info 7/2020>

I found that using Wireguard offered a perfect encryption solution for UUCP transfers. UUCP over Wireguard not only adds solid encryption, but also utilizes UDP which is wicked fast. It really breathed new life into this project.

Answer 4

Well, you've covered the two options I was going to mention, and, it's been quite some time since I was in the Taylor codebase, but as I recall, we could easily update the codebase for the "t" protocol to set up SSL on its own.... I could probably due it but I've got two project commitments already. I'll think on this and see if there's some other way.

Answer 5

For the few that may be interested. I was successful with encrypting all of my UUCP traffic by using Wireguard, the new encryption Kernel Module being touted for IOT applications. Combined with UUCP it's a perfect solution for me and is working flawlessly.