[COFF] UUCP on macOS / *BSD

[gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor)]

On 6/29/20 8:26 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote:
> So, assuming that I understood your problem
>   - and given that I know close to nothing about uucp
>   - and given that I know close to nothing about MacOS pecularities
> 
> I wonder if your problem could be solved by setting up a small crontab 
> entry for user _uucp, where a script would be called every minute 
> and check, if there is previous instance of it running and if there 
> are some jobs in the queue, and do the stuff when the answer were no 
> and yes, respectively.

You're quite close to what I've seen on other systems.  It would 
probably also work on the current problem system as a work around.  But 
I don't think it will solve the underlying problem.

There is an underlying utility that's part of the UUCP suite named 
"uucico" and it's job is to connect to itself and transfer files.  It 
has a function where it will see if there is any work (UUCP terms) and 
if there is, do it.

So I've frequently seen uucico run on an hourly cron job on a number of 
systems.

I do believe that would work around the problem.

I'm trying to understand what the problem is that is actually happening 
so that I can use things properly and not need to rely on the workaround.

Incidentally, other Linux systems running the same software with the 
same config don't need the workaround.  :-|

> Special user moving files over ssh, normal users putting files in 
> the queue.

There's some more nuance to it than that.  But, sure, that's the gist of it.

Subsystem that runs as a dedicated user moving files between systems, 
over SSH in this case.  Normal users use other commands to ask said 
subsystem to do work on their behalf.

Said subsystem includes creating and managing a queue structure, 
determining if / when to connect (call) a remote system, transferring 
files both ways, dealing with failures, and retrying.

Oh, ya, said subsystem is an industry standard across most Unixes and 
some other platforms.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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