Xref: utzoo news.admin:15231 news.software.b:8260 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!alembic!csu From: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b Subject: Re: Really funny jokes being missed Message-ID: <1991Jun14.044639.16135@alembic.acs.com> Date: 14 Jun 91 04:46:39 GMT References: <1991Jun7.235143.12451@alembic.acs.com> Organization: Alembic Computer Services, McLean VA Lines: 61 In article mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*) writes: >csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes: >> I have a 60 MB news partition on this machine. If it fills up and >> news gets dropped on the floor, that's life. > >Indeed, and this is a freak event which you can't do anything about. > >> If I run out of inodes, >> I expire everything older than one day, and if some of it hasn't >> been batched yet for transmission to my downstream sites, well, that's >> life. > >This, again, is a freak event which you can't do anything to prevent. One of the most common causes of these "freak" events is when some idiot screws around with news headers and then dumps a huge volume of ancient articles into the net. This is one of things that Cnews now prevents. >> And if some bit of defective software (or defective wetware) >> produces a malformed header and C News chucks it into the bit bucket, >> that also is life. > >But that's something you CAN do something about. I could, yes. But why should I? >I suspect that if your news spool filled up once every ten days or so, your >downstream sites *would* complain. If through some random catastrophe my >postings get deleted, then I don't care. What I *do* care about is when >someone *deliberately* sets up his software to *repeatedly* delete my postings >in order to "punish" me for using buggy software. No one is "punishing" you, unless whoever produced your defective posting software knew it was defective. Malformed articles can cause problems for the entire net. The Cnews patches help reduce those problems. This is A Good Thing. It helps solve the problem. Your buggy software was part of the cause of the problem. So, yes, you suffered. Most unfortunate. But not a reason for the rest of the net to revert to having to deal with spasms of ancient news articles, nor for us to have to deal with the possibility of floods e-mail notices to sites generating bad headers. >> >Furthermore, if your attitude to people at other sites making errors is "fuc >> >you", then presumably you don't send bounce messages for badly-addressed >> >mail. >> >> Of course not. My good buddy, Mailer Daemon, does it for me. If he can. > >Well, your good buddy Cnews Pedantry Daemon ought to issue error reports on a >similar basis. There is a certain amount of effort going on right now to find a reasonable way to do this. As yet, no one has found a way that is both guaranteed to return an error report and also guaranteed not to flood the net with them. When someone does find such a method, it will probably be incorporated into C News. Until then, people with buggy posting software will have to rely on the kindness of strangers. -- Dave Mack