Xref: utzoo news.admin:15163 news.software.b:8229 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!smoke.cs.toronto.edu!moraes Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b From: moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: <91Jun12.131323edt.1086@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto References: <1991Jun7.235143.12451@alembic.acs.com> <517_=9&@uzi-9mm.fulcrum.bt.co.uk> <1991Jun12.001917.239@gacvx2.gac.edu> Date: 12 Jun 91 17:13:40 GMT Lines: 24 dan@gacvx2.gac.edu writes: >I would think that it would be better for the authors of cnews and other news >systems to spend the time preventing their software from sending out old news, >by fixing the conditions that cause old news to be sent, rather than filtering >it from the net at large. Ah, so it's now possible for news software to detect and prevent administrator error and bad gateway design. Some scenarios that are a little difficult to prevent in software: - site goes down for a while, comes up with old news batches (note: not batchfiles) still around and sends them out, since they're in a uucp queue. - someone restores a trashed partition from fairly old backups and accidentally restores some old news batches. - a gateway from a network that does not preserve message-ids goes nuts. Yes, we've seen all of these happen; some of them quite recently, in fact. Mark. -- "It's only netnews"