Re: The Remailer Crisis

[Jaeson.M.Engle@josaiah.sewanee.edu (Rhys Kyraden)]

>But is your Mac on the Internet on a more or less continuous basis? A
>remailer that only works when the owner happens to log on to collect
>his mail is not terribly useful (though not useless, as others have
>also noted....just a "very unpredictable lag time" remailer, sort of
>the "surface mail" of e-mail).

Yes, my machine has a 56k direct line in, 24 hrs. a day, 7 days a week
(during school months!;-)) The server you just mailed to is on this
machine.

>It happens that the Net is mainly built up of Unix boxes, hence the
>focus here on Unix. OS/2, Windows, and Mac boxes will be used
>increasinly for constant connection applications, so the idea has
>merit, long term.

I understand this, and am trying my best to cope. I am currently in the
process of developing a name server for the Mac, because the Mac has alot
against it when it comes to being a real eintity on the 'Net.

>(Another nit: the Mac, which is what I also use, currently lacks
>preemptive multitasking. Thus, if one's Mac is playing a multimedia
>CD-ROM when new mail comes in, it likely won't get remailed until the
>first app quits or is manually switched out. (Yeah, a few things like
>print drivers can run in background, and maybe the new TIA emulators
>can trick the OS into processing SLIP or PPP mail in the background,
>but who knows?) The consensus is that the Mac is powerful, but it
>ain't cut out yet to be a Unix box.)

I agree that the Mac lacks some of the more powerful Unix features, namely
preemtive multitasking, but I also believe that, at least with the newer
Macs, CPU time-sharing is more efficient than it used to be. Know of Chuck
Shotton's MacHTTP WWW server for the Mac? An excelent piece of software
that gives literally on demand, and at least with my copy, it is always in
the background. Really about the only thing that cuts out CPU timesharing
is multimedia, mostly 3D grahpis games and highly intense graphics
software, neither of which I use (much!;-))

>The language is a lesser deal. Remember that Eric Hughes knocked out
>the first remailer in Perl in a few days, and MacPerl exists for the
>Mac. Going to Pascal would probably be more trouble than it's worth.

I thought that it was in Perl. I have tried pulling Unix Perl scripts and
running them under MacPerl, but it doesn't quite do it. In fact, it usually
doesn't do anything but spew errors back at you.

>But the most important feature to have is a solid, reliable connection
>to the Net. A computer that gets taken to classes, is not connected to
>the Net, etc., is not very useful as a remailer.

As I noted, I have a constant 56k line in/ out. And mine never moves...
it's a bit large... mine is a Quadra 660av (ugh).

>(The key is not that a remailer can sometimes remail, but that it can
>be counted on to be part of chain without the mail getting "dropped on
>the floor.")
>
>--Tim May

As far as I can tell, and maybe you have other knowedge on this, my
situation should work, assuming I can run the software. What do you think?
Should the remailer Perl script run under MacPerl?

                                             aka:
(-: Jaeson M. Engle    ||    jme@josaiah.sewanee.edu :-)
(-:      www server: http://josaiah.sewanee.edu/         :-)
(-: It's February 3rd! IT'S TIME!!! Ask me for details!:-)
(-: Finger 'jme@josaiah.sewanee.edu' for my Public :-)
                                        PGP block.