Re: how to connect UUCP nodes in the 21st century?

In article <3urs7l-88i.ln1@intheattic.eternal-september.org>,
Juancho  <eternal@notreally.com> wrote:

On 2025-02-11, Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:

Juancho  <eternal@notreally.com> wrote:

>
I was thinking about the "ct" and "cu" commands of the uucp suite.

>
`cu` is just a serial communications program; it lets you use a
serial port and whatever that serial port is connected to;
historically it also had some syntactic sugar to connect to
systems that the administrator had put in the local UUCP
configuration.  Fundamentally it only lets you execute remote
commands in so far as the thing on the other end of the serial
port you use it with lets you do that, and `cu` itself is just
the communications agent.  I still occasionally use `cu` to talk
to little embedded devices and things like that.  Critically,
I doubt you could do `cu thathost!thishost` and expect it to
work (what if all outgoing lines from `thishost` were busy at
the time?).
>
Similarly, `ct` does more or less the same thing, but assumes
that a line is connected to a modem, and knows how to dial a
phone number (back in the bad old days this was a lot more
complex than having a Hayes compatible modem that understood the
"AT" command set); in that sense, it's a little less flexible
than `cu`.  But again, it's just a communications agent, not a
remote execution/login program itself.
>
`uux`, on the other hand, was actually designed to run commands
on some remote system: `uux seismo!me /bin/ls` or something
more involved like, `uux ucbvax!seismo!me /bin/ls` or whatever.
Still, this isn't exactly "remote login."

>
In other words, it was common practice, before the Internet was
mainstream, to use cu/ct to login into other UNIX systems through serial
lines and modems. Or my Xenix memories may be failing me.

I don't think that's what I said, but it's probably a true
statement.  This was not, however, using UUCP for remote login
in any recognizable sense.

        - Dan C.