Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!mips!samsung!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!mantis!mathew
From: mathew@mantis.co.uk (Giving C News a *HUG*)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: automatically mailing warnings about dropped
Message-ID: <0R3o48w164w@mantis.co.uk>
Date: 17 Jun 91 16:39:20 GMT
References: <1991Jun14.224045.26157@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK.
Lines: 54

xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
> > chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
> > I hereby retract my 10^hopcount proposal in
> > favor of an error report broadcast using a
> > systematically changed message ID. I'm not sure
> > whether that solution is the best one possible,
> > but it's the best I've read so far, and I am now
> > persuaded that its cost would be acceptable.
> 
> Too much overhead; you are targeting a message at
> _all_ Usenet sites to inform _one_ site.  I really
> can't see the attraction of that at all.

It's the safest solution.  As far as I know, nobody has come up with a good
objection to it.

>         all the methods of using news to do the job
> send far too many copies to sites that don't care at
> all about the information, wasting time, money, and
> patience.

They send *one* article to each site for each *one* header-invalid article
that that site would otherwise have received.  I think that's pretty
acceptable.  Remember, stale articles are still silently dropped.

> 2) A human factors problem: how to put the
> information returned in a place where it is hard to
> ignore, not lost in a mass of similar, but
> inapplicable, warnings that condition the intended
> recipient out of looking for the warnings at all.

The news-based solution has two answers to this:

1. Responsible sysadmins can set up their software to look for error reports
   with that site's name in.

2. A central machine (say, at UUNET) can send a single mail-based warning to
   each site appearing in the error reports for a given week.

> It's the old "crying wolf" problem. I have yet to
> see a proposal here that beats sending a small
> number of _pertinent_ notices to the email box of
> the author/site admin, a location that a) is
> regularly perused by the recipient, and b) waits
> "forever" to be read (no expire == loss of
> information).

Right. But part of the news-based solution includes this. All we need is one
or two volunteer sites to monitor the errors newsgroup.


mathew