Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News's getting garbled news response from B News
Message-ID: <1991Jan29.180611.13185@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <9101241837.AA01633@decpa.pa.dec.com> <1246@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 1991 18:06:11 GMT

In article <1246@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes:
>>... Are there
>>known compatible problem between C News and B News?
>
>I help administrate a local B News site that had the same problem
>after its feed switched to C news.  It turned out that they
>weren't generating compressed batches correctly...

I'm always puzzled when people report things like this, because C News
has talked to B News -- correctly, completely, without dropping articles
or doing anything else unkind -- from the beginning.  When problems have
cropped up, it's usually been because somebody got creative with the
configuration, without really understanding what he was doing, rather
than following the supplied examples.

>I'm convinced that some articles are getting dropped, and C News' "terse"
>log files are pretty much useless for explaining what's really
>happening...

What extra information should they supply?  Local experience has been that
they tell you everything you really want for debugging.

>... the C News administrator
>has never been able to get it to work properly despite weeks of
>trying.

Details would be useful.  This is not the usual experience.
-- 
If the Space Shuttle was the answer,   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
what was the question?                 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry