[Uucp-general] Various UUCP-related projects

[John Goerzen]

Hi folks,

I thought I would mention various UUCP-related projects that I'm 
aware of.

=== (Pseudo-) active UUCP networks:

www.sdf.org offers UUCP feeds of email - 
https://sdf.org/?tutorials/uucp

on IRC chat.tilde.org, there is #uucp where people are working on 
a full UUCP network.  There was information on 
https://tildegit.org/UUCP-Grassroots/incubator/wiki/Home until 
yesterday, which hopefully will reappear soon.

=== UUCP carriers

I have support for running UUCP over LoRA and XBee low-power, 
long-distance, license-free radios:

https://github.com/jgoerzen/lorapipe/blob/master/doc/lorapipe.1.md#uucp

and

https://github.com/jgoerzen/xbnet/blob/master/doc/xbnet.1.md#uucp

=== Running other protocols over UUCP

NNCP (see below) can run atop UUCP; see 
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/tunneling.org#uucp

=== UUCP modern derivative: NNCP

NNCP is basically a modern UUCP.  NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to 
telnet.  It has built-in crypto (end-to-end) with tor-like onion 
routing, supports USB sticks and mounted directories as 
first-class transports in addition to network or stdin/stdout 
connections, doesn't require ssh for secure transport, etc.  It is 
similar to UUCP in that it is source-routed store-and-forward. 
NNCP commands are syntactically different than UUCP but 
conceptually similar, and can be dropped in to replace UUCP with 
only config modifications for things like Postfix and Exim, and a 
small wrapper script for INN.  See https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/

> From the website: "[NNCP is] -hoc friend-to-friend (F2F) 
statically routed darknet delay-tolerant networks for 
fire-and-forget secure reliable files, file requests, Internet 
mail and commands transmission. All packets are integrity checked, 
end-to-end encrypted, explicitly authenticated by known 
participants public keys. Onion encryption is applied to relayed 
packets. Each node acts both as a client and server, can use push 
and poll behaviour model. Also there is multicasting areas 
support.  Out-of-box offline sneakernet/floppynet, dead drops, 
sequential and append-only CD-ROM/tape storages, air-gapped 
computers support. But online TCP daemon with full-duplex 
resumable data transmission exists. "

There is an active public relay for NNCP: 
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/quux-relay.org

Usenet feeds are available over NNCP (using send-uucp.pl and a 
tiny wrapper script): 
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/usenet.org

NNCP can be tunneled over other transports, including Syncthing, 
AWS, ssh, radios, and of course regular TCP. 
https://github.com/jgoerzen/nncp-tools/blob/main/docs/tunneling.org

You can sync Git repositories over NNCP using its multicast areas 
support 
https://github.com/jgoerzen/gitsync-nncp/blob/main/gitsync-nncp.org

I have a blog series about NNCP, covering what I'm doing with it 
at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/tag/nncp .  This 
includes airgapped ZFS backups (with up to 250GB packets),

Some more links from Sergey Matveev, NNCP author:

https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Use-cases.html covers things like 
satellite links, airgapping, etc.

https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Integration.html discusses 
integrating with Postfix, Exim, web downloading, Git, etc.

https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Comparison.html provides a 
comparison with UUCP.

=== Other discussion areas

comp.mail.uucp on Usenet still has subscribers and is periodically 
active.

- John