Xref: utzoo unix-pc.general:3570 comp.sys.att:7312
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!spdcc!gnosys!gst
From: gst@gnosys.UUCP (Gary S. Trujillo)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general,comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: Hard Disk questions
Summary: there's an echo in here...  :-)
Message-ID: <271@gnosys.UUCP>
Date: 14 Aug 89 17:41:28 GMT
References: <9186@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19995@cup.portal.com> <701@argon.UUCP> <569@uncle.UUCP>
Reply-To: gst@gnosys.UUCP (Gary S. Trujillo)
Organization: gst's 3B1 - Somerville, Massachusetts
Lines: 93

In article <569@uncle.UUCP> jbm@uncle.UUCP (John B. Milton) writes:
> In article <701@argon.UUCP> ebh@argon.UUCP (Ed Horch) writes:
> >In article <19995@cup.portal.com> thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) writes:
> >>MB, formatted (std, 17 sec/trk)	42.8			71.2
> >>
> >>MB, formatted (UNIXPC, 16 sec/trk)	40.3			67.1
> >>(ignoring the spare sec per track)
> >
> >What does the Unix PC do with that extra sector?  Is that how it
> >remaps bad blocks?
> 
> Yes, that's how "it" does it...

Some of you may recall that this article was posted by jbm way back on 3 July.
It would appear that there's a problem out on the net that has been affecting
virtually all newsgroups (I guess) which results in ancient messages coming
back to haunt us.  If you preserve your news log files for a long time, the
articles would be rejected as duplicates.  But I, for one, expire my logs.

Anyway, I just thought y'all might like to know.  Here are excerpts from some
recent traffic in news.admin that discuss the problem:

|Path: husc6!mailrus!wasatch!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!logicon.arpa!Makey
|From: Makey@LOGICON.ARPA (Jeff Makey)
|Newsgroups: news.admin
|Subject: Old articles reposted: the saga continues
|Summary: Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!
|Message-ID: <524@logicon.arpa>
|Date: 11 Aug 89 23:36:10 GMT
|Organization: Future Procrastinators of America
|
|It's happening again!  Below are the message-ids of 70 articles that
|originally appeared about June 30 but have been reposted with a date
|of August 8.  They all include
|
|rochester!rit!tropix!moscom!ur-valhalla!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!sunybcs
|
|in their Path: lines, and none of the articles are in the alt
|hierarchy.  I find it easier to simply delete the offending files than
|to generate local cancel messages for them.
|
|I wish this would stop.
|
|--------------------------- cut here ----------------------------
|<1003@tekbspa.UUCP>
|<1006@tekbspa.UUCP>
|...
|                           :: Jeff Makey
|
|Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department
|    Disclaimer: Logicon doesn't even know we're running news.
|    Internet: Makey@LOGICON.ARPA    UUCP: {nosc,ucsd}!logicon.arpa!Makey
|
|


|Path: ...!ginosko!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!usc!ucsd!nosc!logicon.arpa!Makey
|From: Makey@LOGICON.ARPA (Jeff Makey)
|Newsgroups: news.admin
|Subject: Re: Old articles reposted: the saga continues
|Summary: Yet another 100 articles.
|Keywords: $&@*%!
|Message-ID: <526@logicon.arpa>
|Date: 13 Aug 89 06:13:21 GMT
|References: <524@logicon.arpa>
|Organization: Future Procrastinators of America
|
|Here's another 100 message-ids of old news that has reappeared with a
|date of either July 22 or August 8.  These articles all have
|
|     rit!tropix!moscom!ur-valhalla!uhura.cc.rochester.edu
|
|in theirs paths, which is slightly shorter than another path that was
|implicated earlier (rochester was on the left end and sunybcs was on
|the right end).  This set of 100 articles used about 200,000 bytes of
|disk space.  I find these articles by grepping through the news spool
|area for "tropix!moscom".  I have no proof that one of these two sites
|is actually responsible, but the technique works for me.
|
|------------------------- cut here ------------------------------
|<1025@cernvax.UUCP>
|<1049@philmds.UUCP>
|...

BTW, I have confirmed that the path segment quoted in these messages was
in fact in the duplicate articles I have received.  I also found the problem
affecting comp.sources.misc (of all things!).

Beware!

-- 
Gary S. Trujillo			      {linus,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!gnosys!gst
Somerville, Massachusetts			  {ima,stech,wjh12}!gnosys!gst