Xref: utzoo news.admin:14741 news.software.b:8026 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!daver!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: automatically mailing warnings about dropped news to originators Message-ID: <1991May29.180201.5365@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 29 May 91 18:02:01 GMT Followup-To: news.admin Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 106 [It is incredible to me that the supposedly professional system administrators of the net are incapable of maintaining a meaningful subject line in long discussions. With such an example ("Really funny jokes being missed" for a news.admin discussion about email warnings on detecting header problems on articles from non-local sites), what hope for the casual news users to learn good habits?] The net discussion about dropping articles without warning to the originator provoked a local email flurry on the subject, from which one potentially useful idea emerged. The demurrer has been put forth that automatically mailing warnings back to the originator when news articles are dropped would cause a "flood" of email, more damaging to the site of origin than having articles originating there silently dropped. I think this is just an excuse for not thinking the problem through to a workable solution. I propose the following solution for folks to shoot full of holes or refine to usability, as the mood strikes. There are, I am told, about 1000 Cnews sites right now, a minority of the 10,000 odd sites in the mail maps, but probably a majority of the larger sites important to net connectivity, so the following proposal would take some parameter tuning. Instead of mailing a warning back each time an article is dropped, each site should roll a random number generator, with a small chance of mailing a warning, and a large chance of dropping the article silently. Each type of news software should consider itself the whole net for purposes of determining what the right fraction of warnings should be, since the choice of articles dropped _may_ be independent for each type. For 1000 Cnews sites, a 1/500 or 1/1000 chance of sending a warning would mean (if the article actually propagated to all but the Cnews sites through successfully sneaking past the filters of the other news software (Bnews, VMSNEWS(?), Waffle, etc., and then got passed to each Cnews site and there dropped) that two or one warnings on average would be mailed back _from the whole net_ per article with mangled header detected by the particular filter in Cnews. If it were also detected by five other kinds of news software, each also mailing one or two warnings, at worst a dozen or so letters would arrive, not an overwhelming burden In the more usual case where Cnews dropping the articles from a site mostly destroys connectivity, and the rest of the net never sees the article, the feedback would be slower, but eventually would happen, still providing some level of warning. This is the case for which tuning of the warning fraction should be considered; better to provide too much (but not an overwhelming level of) warning, than too little, to see problems discovered and fixed sooner. See also two paragraphs below. In the nasty case where a site mangles headers in carload lots, and dumps a multi-megabyte slug of old news on the net, a lot of extra mail would go back to article authors (or preferably, "usenet" or "postmaster" or "root" at the same site), but not the thousandfold multiplier that an unrandomized warning generator would provoke. Better yet, by the sampling that would occur across the net, lots of site sysadmins would quickly have in hand sufficient widely distributed looks at paths to the problem to narrow down to a single site creating the mangled headers and get the problem cut off early, as opposed to the current two or three day lag while enough postings reach news.admin to do the trick, and the modem at the offending site keeps dumping old news in massive amounts onto the rest of the net. The case of a leaf site feeding directly into a site potentially dropping articles should probably have a _much_ higher (or unity) chance of a warning being mailed back, but it would be little extra software effort to make the randomizing fraction separate and tunable for each feed a site maintains, so that generic incoming netwide newsfeeds get low probability of warning per article (lots of other sites get a chance to mail a warning, too) while client sites with no other chance of warning get a high probability of warning, since only the feed site will ever see the offending article. This proposal cuts down the email to a fraction of "warn about each infraction at each site where detected" rates, while providing a fair level of feedback to each site generating bad headers. Complaints, problems, improvements? Kent, the man from xanth.