
Dataforge UUCP - stargrave
https://uucp.dataforge.tk/
======
praetor242
Hello! I'm Wes (aka; praetor), the founder of the UUCP project ! I'm humbled
my project reached the front page of HN and has generated some interest.

Yes. I do apologize for the documentation being sparse. I'm developing the
Tier 1 provisioning scripts, and documenting at the same time. Plus,
unfortunately, I have a full-time life. But once I finish the Tier 1 stuff, I
can delegate duties out to those with an interest :D

Yup. It's all run via SSH. The preferred server is Taylor UUCP, which is super
flexible. I've sent an e-mail to the developer, Ian Taylor, to hopefully
revive that project and breath some life into UUCP. It's a fantastically
resilient protocol and will run over damned near anything. We've even had some
talk of running UUCP over ham radio links!!!

All the Tier 1 hosts are mesh interconnected, so even if one goes down, it
doesn't take huge swathes of the network with it. With how the Internet is
shaping up to be, if Google goes down, it's taking a huge piece of the network
with it. This is really intended to reawaken the DIY ethos the Internet was
founded on. Mostly public nixes and tilde servers, but anyone with some
dedication can be a Tier 1. We've kinda democratized it that way.

And no, you don't have to be the "right kind of freedom fighter". The Tier 1
operators have a gentleman's agreement to let anything pass through their node
to the broader network unless it's something like CP or flagrantly against the
law (or spam)

It's an exciting project! It really is a network for the modern nerd, and is
ripe for all sorts of projects!

Please join us on IRC @ irc.tilde.chat or subscribe to the project mailing
list at uucp@lists.tildeverse.org

See ya on the network! :D

~~~
bcaa7f3a8bbc
To me, merely encrypting the transport layer via SSH is far from secure,
especially when the network is used by "hackers" and "freedom fighters".
Today, if a network wants to be immune from tracking by design, it should
officially support to be accessed from anonymous networks. The UUCP protocol
is perfect for relatively high-latency, low-bandwidth anonymous network, like
Tor or i2p (Particularly, i2p by itself is a great project, the only issue is
the latency of the network is too high for HTTP), it would be great if some
Tier 1 hosts can be accessed from Tor/i2p via a raw TCP socket (without SSH,
since it's unnecessary and increases overhead in these networks). Illegal
content and spam can be a problem, only peering to reputation hosts can solve
the problem at large.

~~~
praetor242
Nothing says we can't run some nodes via i2p or Tor, and I suspect eventually
someone will do it, which I like. I'd like to this to be a place where people
with internet censorship can get the world out when Twitter fails. Hence the
freedom fighter. We don't impose a transport. SSH is just a good trade off for
easy and secure. The ol' UUCP books have to be dusted, so I want to keep the
entry reasonably low. Once people are familiar (or re-familiar) with UUCP and
feel confident enough to make contributions, I think we'll see this very
thing. Like I said, it's ripe for tinkering.

~~~
1996
Tor should be the only way to link nodes. The only reason for anyone to use
batched mail and news in 2019 would be for the security - which means tor.

There is no reason to use SSH, as it expose the IP address of the
participants.

Setting up UUCP for mail and news on localhost is not so easy anyway (meaning
you must setup an MTA +NNTP daemon unless you do old school QWK), so you might
as well ask the person to spend 5 minute to configure an onion address.

Like the previous author, I also strongly suggest you change the design to
make it a cool and useful project instead of just a nostalgia fueled hobby
(SGI servers??)

------
NelsonMinar
LOL kids these days. I remember when we first got Internet access and didn't
have to batch up a UUCP download late at night any more, what a great
convenience! Also things like URLs are remarkably useful; finding a file via
UUCP was quite a hassle. I mean as an art project goes, sure, why not? But
it's hard to imagine UUCP offers any practical advantages unless you literally
don't have an always-on Internet connection.

For more nostalgia, enjoy the UUCP maps:
[http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/](http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/)

~~~
mmaunder
In South Africa where I grew up, we had the entire country's internet hanging
off a single dialup UUCP gateway at Rhodes University in Grahamstown from 1988
until 1991.

In 91 they replaced the dialup UUCP link with a 9600kbps leased line. Only
universities had access. We got our first commercial ISP in 1993.

~~~
throw0101a
> [ZA] got our first commercial ISP in 1993.

Interesting 'doc' from the Internet Society on the effort from a few years ago
on Internet exchange points (IXPs):

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFv-9iPwwLE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFv-9iPwwLE)

------
kokey
UUCP is one of those good things that many early ISP providers overlooked, You
had companies with an e-mail server that would dial up to the internet to send
and receive e-mail and would get a dynamic IP address. This would be no
problem for UUCP, but since many newcomers to the internet didn't know it they
would use some clunky dynamic DNS system instead. Also if the connection
dropped there was no 'resume' feature if this happened during the sending or
receiving of a large e-mail, so it would have to start sending or receiving
that e-mail all over again.

------
mmaunder
I suspect this is #1 on HN because we are all very interested in ideas that
enable decentralized publishing. The trouble with uucp is that it wont take
long for a tier 1 node to disconnect a leaf for being the wrong kind of
freedom fighter.

------
tyingq
Interesting. I had no idea someone had layered SSH and certificate auth on top
of UUCP.

Used UUCP a lot back in the day to push software updates out to customer
machines over dial up.

~~~
rocky1138
I'd love to read more about these stories. Do you blog?

~~~
tyingq
I should, but no. It was a company that sold software to hospitals that would
integrate software/servers from different departments via a protocol called
HL7. Hospitals were not generally on the internet in the early 90's. So, we
would do a week on site installing an AIX box and the software, do a few
integrations, etc. Before we left, we'd install a 56k modem.

UUCP was handy because you could push files and run remote commands on a batch
schedule without a lot of scripting. We did have some clients that had more
complicated setups where we would have to resort to SLIP (serial line IP) and
more traditional scripts/rsh/etc. All terribly insecure, with plain text
passwords in files...or worse, ".rhosts" files.

~~~
stevekemp
Same here UUCP setup to trigger syncing of nightly billing runs on SCO(!)
Unixware servers.

All the code was written as a combination of Microfocus COBOL and hairy shell-
scripts. I recall we had a lot of random SSH-tunnels being held open via keep-
alive-pings, and SLIP was definitely something I had to use.

------
nickodell
Seems interesting, but unfortunately the leaf guide is empty.

[https://uucp.dataforge.tk/~uucp/wiki/index.php?n=Main.LeafNo...](https://uucp.dataforge.tk/~uucp/wiki/index.php?n=Main.LeafNode)

~~~
aewens
Hey, I'm one of the Tier 1 nodes for the Dataforge UUCP project. It's
currently a work-in-progress as the Tier 1 guide was only just recently
completed. If you are interested in joining as a lead node, you can get help
setting it up in #uucp on the tilde.chat network.

------
blfr
I remember uucpssh.org[1] which I had bookmarked for a while but didn't get
around to setting up before it closed down. Now it resolves to a spam website.
Sad!

[1]
[http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/March2004/article330.shtml](http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/March2004/article330.shtml)

------
icedchai
Interesting. I used to have a UUCP email and news feed back in the 90's, for
the BBS I ran in high school.

------
kseistrup
I ran AmigaUUCP way back when. I feel tempted to set up UUCP again…

------
catern
Somewhat in a similar vein (in that it provides an NNTP interface and provides
for decentralized distribution of newsgroups/mailing lists) is public-inbox
[0] which is used by kernel.org for mirroring LKML; it's quite straightforward
to get running and has a great technical foundation on git.

[0] [https://public-inbox.org](https://public-inbox.org)

------
rbc
I used to run a leaf node in Hawaii with an AT&T 3B1 using its internal 1200
baud modem. My upstream was Pegasus Information Systems, run by by a guy named
Richard Foulk.

------
jbotz
What are "tilde networks"?

~~~
kragen
Tilde.club explains at [http://tilde.club/~faq/](http://tilde.club/~faq/).

~~~
Crontab
Also worth checking the Dataforge UUCP site list.

[https://uucp.dataforge.tk/sites.html](https://uucp.dataforge.tk/sites.html)

------
kunguru
some examples of this in use would be good, the documentation looks a bit
sparse.

------
no_identd
I can haz UUCP+Briar using (in order of preference) GNUnet/i2p/Tor as the
underlay with full end to end PGP encryption, Web & Chain of trust & custody
attestation, via fully bootstrappable & replicable builds?

No?

Meh. Guess it'll take another 7 years until crypto & libre take off.

~~~
1996
This. You are downvoted but your technical critique is spot on.

Throw in Monero to pay for services and you've got a great technological stack
possible right now, while something like that at the time of the cryptonomicon
was just a dream.

It could be a cool project if it took advantages of all the pieces of
technology we now have that they didn't have back then - PGP was a late
addition, replicable builds not a concern, tor and cryptocurrencies yet to be
invented.

~~~
no_identd
Thanks. I suspect the downvotes come about due to the rather tongue-in-cheek
way I started my comment with, albeit I wanna avoid speculating about
reasoning behind downvotes.

Speaking of Monero & paying for services: GNUnet has the GNU Taler project.
While not applicable to the same use cases to which Monero applies, it fits
into a related niche very much in need of filling.

