Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!brchh104!bgrgs1!rgreene
From: rgreene@bgrgs1.bnr.ca (Bob Greene)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: NNTP/News propagation question
Message-ID: <2657@brchh104.bnr.ca>
Date: 26 Apr 91 13:10:13 GMT
Sender: news@brchh104.bnr.ca
Reply-To: rgreene@bgrgs1.bnr.ca (Bob Greene)
Organization: Bell Northern Research
Lines: 32

Excuse the redundancy if this has been asked before. We
have a curious situation in BNR, in that news starts here
in Texas (Dallas [US]), is passed internally up to Ottawa
(Canada) and then comes back down to the rest of the news
sites everywhere.

Now, if I'm sitting at my terminal in Dallas, and I post
something setting distribution to "dfw", what happens? 
All of our local Dallas, TX machines see it, then we
pass the article on up to our Ottawa machine, now it's 
not in dfw, so does it dump it on the floor even 
though all the rest of dfw is only accessible through
it?

In more generic terms, since no news machine knows the
geographical locations of it's neighbors, doesn't that mean
to guarantee correct distribution, each news machine 
must propagate each news article to all it's neighbors
even though that article may not be in it's own 
distribution? And if that's the case, then the whole
point of having a distribution is void.

I have a feeling that the articles just get dumped on the
floor, since the whole Usenet news system was really 
intended to be run with your neighbors being geographically
proximate. *Sigh* That'd be unfortunate, as it would
mean posting to a 'dfw' distribution for me would require
posting with a 'na' distribution to get out. :( :(

Bob Greene            Sunspots (comp.sys.sun) Moderator     ESN 446-7396
LAN/WAN Engineering and Support                            (214) 907-7396
Bell Northern Research, Richardson, Texas, USA             rgreene@bnr.ca