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From: flee@gondor.psu.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Using "local" as a newsgroup name considered harmful
Message-ID: <2857@psuvax1.psu.edu>
Date: Tue, 18-Aug-87 23:53:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: psuvax1.2857
Posted: Tue Aug 18 23:53:39 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Aug-87 04:51:20 EDT
References: <434@acornrc.UUCP> <587@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <14347@watmath.waterloo.edu> <8430@utzoo.UUCP>
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Reply-To: flee@gondor.psu.edu (Felix Lee)
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In article <8430@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>U of Toronto occasionally sees U of Texas news too.  Geoff and I are thinking
>about a solution for this for C news; it's not simple.

Case:  Someone at Univ. Wisconsin posts to soc.motss and uw.general,
distribution world.  The article turns up in uw.general at Univ. Waterloo.

Case:  I want to post to Penn State and Univ. Waterloo, so I post the
article to psu.general and uw.general, distribution na.  It turns up
in uw.general at Univ. Wisconsin.

Problem:  Given two regions A1 and A2 with the same name A, how do you
tell if the name A refers to A1 or A2?

Answer:  You can't.

Solution:  Make all names unique.  Either make sure they're globally
unique, like UUCP, or qualify the names, like ARPA:
	/world/na/usa/canada/waterloo/uw.general
Something less clumsy would be better.

Solution:  Disallow posting to a region you don't belong in.  Force
Distribution to be the smallest distribution of all the Newsgroups,
so the article doesn't ever leave the region.

(Currently, a newsgroup's distribution is the top-level name, if that
name is found in LIBDIR/distributions; otherwise, it's "world".)

Munging the Newsgroups line to delete local groups won't work, because
the article could conceivably hop out of the region and hop back in
faster than it hops across the region.

Any other solutions?
--
Felix Lee	flee@gondor.psu.edu	{cbosgd,cmcl2}!psuvax1!gondor!flee
Copyright (C) 1987 by Felix Lee.  Reprinted with permission.