On Tuesday, April 14, 1987 at 11:44:06 AM UTC-7, Michael Padlipsky wrote:
Just got around to reading the Subj: msg and hope it's not too late
to point out that the desired effect (of passwordless "spoolers" via
FTP) can be achieved straightforwardly given the mechanisms of a
couple of my old (one ancient, actually) RFCs. Since it would take
longer for me to find the numbers than to summarize, here goes:
Back in ~'73, when mail was done via FTP, we had a problem with
not having all Hosts able/willing to let given users in without
passwords (indeed, some Hosts didn't even demand USER commands,
muchless PASSs, but others demanded both). In a little thing
called "What Is 'Free'?" (RFC # in the 500s, I expect), I suggested
that any mail senders which encountered the Login Expected FTP
code should use USER NETML and PASS NETML (and any mail receivers
on systems that demanded logins should duly cause the appropriate
accounts to be created). Seems to me we could do the same thing
with "NETSPL" for the passwordless aspect of the current thing.
Then a year or two ago (and this one actually is in the latest
version of the FTP RFC), for some obscure reason I decided there
ought to be an FTP command for STOring under a Unique name for use
in all sorts of "pool" directory cases, so if I remembered that
one's number and the other one's I could have just said Why not use
the RFC 5xx and 9xx tricks? (By the way, the 5xx trick was duly
implemented and worked for years [even if nobody other than
Multics did the receiving end part].)
If my current state of seemingly eternal jetlag hasn't caused me
to miss the point, I think that should do it. Do I need to
write another RFC to forget the number of?
cheers, map
P.S. Lest anybody misunderstand, I was at Multics at the time and
invented the fictious mail receiver thing in self defense; cf. pp.
84-5 of The Book.
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Tha'ts awesome.
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