Xref: utzoo news.admin:14509 news.software.b:7827 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: Date: 20 May 91 14:31:19 GMT References: <1991May17.170033.17759@dsuvax.uucp> Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK. Lines: 110 ghelmer@dsuvax.uucp (Guy Helmer) writes: > In <5ukZ24w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (CNEWS MUST DIE!) writes: > >chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes: > >> True, C News drops articles on the floor. But it logs having done so, > >> and it notifies the Usenet administrator in the output of newsdaily. > > >So what the hell use is that? None of those Usenet administrators told *ME* > >about it, and I'm the one who has to fix my software. [ Point not answered ] > >If an article can be corrected to conform, then it should be, and should the > >be delivered. > > Henry has pointed out many times that it is difficult to correct > problems in an article. And I have pointed out that certainly in this specific case (my articles being thrown away due to a bad Date: header) it is trivially easy to fix the header. Mail systems do it. > No. You better not pass on the article, or you're part of the problem. If the error is non-critical and you can still pass on the article, why not pass it on? Software which falls over in a heap as a result of bad input is extremely broken, and C News should not attempt to Nanny it. > Attempts to notify the article originator would be a bad thing to do, too. > A site producing news may not receive mail or there may not be a path > for a message to follow back to the sender. In which case the notification will fail to get through. Fair enough. Mail bounce messages sometimes fail to get through, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to send them. > Worse yet, if you attempt to both pass on the article and notify the sender, > you and everyone running software like yours will clog the net with tons, er, > megabytes, of useless messages. Fair enough. So either pass on the article or notify the sender. I'm happy with either. All I'm not happy with is not passing on the article AND not notifying the sender. > And what about a message that's had it's headers munged by a single machine > running junky software? A person would be deluged with messages from > stupid news software incorrectly attributing the bad article to him/her > and his/her software. Deluged with one message, assuming that you don't both forward and report. Or maybe ten or so messages if you're in a bit of the net which is exceptionally well-connected via non-C-news sites. > >Rubbish. Throwing away data containing correctable errors, without issuing > >any warning message, is NEVER the right thing. > > There are warning messages. Be a good admin---correctly configure your > machine's news and mail software (i.e., have news send mail about problems > to usenet and alias usenet to the news admin id, but don't depend on news > to tell you when it is having trouble)---and watch your system. I do. I read our system logs, I check for mail bounces and assist, I respond to queries, I check out errors. Unfortunately, there isn't a log file on our system which will tell me whether UUNET's copy of C News is throwing away all my articles. If there were, there would be no problem. ALL I AM ASKING is that if a posting from a site X is dropped, SOMEONE from site X should be told about it. This notification should NOT rely on some random system administrator happening to take pity on site X. > Dump your self-righteous attack against C-news. News isn't mission-critical; > news isn't life-sustaining; delivery of articles isn't guaranteed. True. However, delivery of articles is much less guaranteed now that C News works in "drop all data on error" mode. As to news not being important -- some people spend literally hours writing stuff to post to Usenet. I'd rather that they continued to do so. And they won't if they think that some big C News site will throw it all away because they made a typo in a header field. > The RFC's > exist, and if your software doesn't implement them correctly, that's tough. Interesting attitude. Am I to take it that you would not object if I wrote a program to forge cancel messages for all articles which were not STRICTLY RFC compliant? > Check your software to make sure it generates RFC-compliant articles. That's > the only way you can be guaranteed that you have a good chance of getting > your article distributed throughout the net. So what if I'm an arts graduate? Do you really expect every random user of Usenet to read through the RFC documents and check the news software which exists on his system? > You can't blame anyone or > any software for dumping your article and not telling you about it, > especially if your software is faulty. Of course I can. C News did not need to dump my article. It deliberately chose to do so, however. It also deliberately chose not to warn me, and so the error continued. Therefore it was at least partly C News' fault that the articles were lost. mathew