Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uupsi!fozzie!stanley From: stanley@phoenix.com (John Stanley) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: BITFTP grief! Message-ID: Date: Wed, 15 May 91 16:12:46 EDT References: <1991May15.042146.29800@iguana.uucp> Organization: Mad Scientist merce@iguana.uucp (Jim Mercer) writes: > [ lsuc.on.ca is a "central" mail hub in toronto, all connections are via > dial-up, no TCP, no SLIP, just uucp ] > > lsuc's mail/uucp system over flowed last night, resulting in unknown quantiti > of news and mail being dropped on the floor. > > coincidentally, our news partition ran out of inodes at the same time and > the entire disk seems trashed. > > we can put in place all the filters we want, but the only way to resolve this > issue of file transfer by email is Education. The only way to solve the problem is to teach uucico to keep track of free space and inodes, and to stop accepting anything until there is space. "Can't tango - no space". And to notify the admin about the problem. This would solve the problem since uucico would happily pass the mail on, news would unbatch and expire, and then there would be space for more. This would even be a beneficial thing all around. It would provide a load averaging mechanism. The size of the transfer is known to the sender, and could easily be passed to the reciever. The receiver could easily check for space. It could even be set up to leave X amount. This is probably in some of the more advanced protocols. The fact that it is not in 'g' is depressing, and is the real source of your trouble. BTW, if anyone knows where I can get a uucico for MS-DOS that DOES use a protocol that fixes this, please let me know. What will you do when someone posts a request for something and dozens of people mail it to him? > how much of a net.lobby do we have to do to get pucc.princeton.edu to shut > down BITFTP? No! This is a valuable service to the entire UUCP community. Well, at least it is here. Your problem (which is the same problem here, BTW) is that a UUCP connection will happily accept that which it cannot store. The BITFTP connection is just a symptom.