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What NETWORKS are accessible from Athena Athena is reliably on the "Internet". This network spans the U.S. and parts of other countries, encompassing many universities, research institutions, corporations, and governmental institutions. You can remotely login with 'telnet' (if you have an account on the remote machine), transfer files (using 'ftp'), and send mail between Athena and any host on the Internet. Currently, the Internet has domain-based nameservers to handle all of the host names that used to be in one huge table. Some top-level domains are EDU, COM, and GOV. Athena's official name is MIT.EDU. This means that athena is under the MIT subdomain of the EDUcational top-level domain. Your mailing address is: username@MIT.EDU So, to send mail to someone on the Internet, you need to know his official mailing address. It will have a form similar to the above example. You can also send mail to hosts on the following networks: BITNET, and UUCP. BITNET is a worldwide network connecting mostly DEC VAX systems and IBM mainframes. Mail between the Internet and the BITNET may be gated through MITVMA.MIT.EDU, so outgoing mail to someone on the BITNET would have this form: username%bitnet-host.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Another network is the UUCP network. Many UUCP hosts are also connected to the Internet, but others are not, instead relying on periodic transmission of e-mail (using the UUCP protocol) over modem. Hosts that are connected only to the UUCP network can be divided into three main categories. First, there are hosts that have domain names just like Internet hosts. E-mail can be sent to these hosts just as if they were on the Internet. However, you'll notice that you cannot, for example, "finger" the host, since the "finger" protocol isn't provided on the UUCP network. Second, there are hosts that have no domain names, but are centrally registered with the UUCP Mapping Project based at Rutgers. E-mail can be sent using the format username%host.UUCP@eddie.mit.edu. Usually, but not always, hosts that choose not to have domain names are not as well connected to the network, so you may find that e-mail there is slow (e.g., over a day to arrive) and sometimes unreliable. Third, there are hosts that support UUCP mail but aren't generally known to the outside world, at all. To send mail to such a host, you need to specify a "path" describing the intermediate hosts that are involved in relaying mail to it. An example would be: relay1!relay2!host!user@EDDIE.MIT.EDU If someone on such a host wanted you to write to them, they would probably need to tell you the correct "relay1!relay2!host!user" portion; it's unlikely that you could determine the correct format on your own. As in the previous case, mail may be slow and unreliable. last updated: 8/17/00 |
