Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!pilchuck!amc!tikal!hplsla!bobk
From: bobk@hplsla.HP.COM (                Bob Kunz)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Someone is editing headers
Message-ID: <6740001@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 8 Jan 88 01:28:41 GMT
References: <22401@hi.unm.edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 38

kurt@hi.unm.edu writes:

|Someone along: hyubvwa!hplsla!tikal!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!husc6!cmcl2!beta
|is editing the "From:" and "Message-ID:" headers.  Sites along this path
|should check their news implementations for correctness.

wunder@hplabs.hp.com writes:

|This is caused by hplsla, and I'm going to go hammer on them.  They
|are running software that has been obsolete for about a year and a
|half.  I'm not sure why it just showed up in the last couple of weeks,
|perhaps they changed their feeds.
|
	Since we were along the path that exhibited the original
	problem, we did investigate and solve this problem.  As it
	turns out, hpubvwa was delivering news to hplsla using an
	older protocol that did not support B News.  hplsla's software
	has been kept up to date and we have been exchanging news 
	with tikal since 1984.  The older protocol from hpubvwa to
	hplsla did not show up sooner because hpubvwa was the head of a 
	dead end list of machines and articles posted there (or down stream) 
	would have enough header information available for people not to 
	notice the missing information.  About two weeks ago, b-mrda decided
	the comp.* feed from hpubvwa was not fast enough, so they started
	exchanging comp.* with polari.  The two articles brought up as
	examples (there are numerous others) all beat our normal feed
	from tikal to hplsla.  That is, they arrived through polari
	and b-mrda through hpubvwa before through tikal.  The headers
	got stripped between hpubvwa and hplsla.  The real (un-stripped)
	version arrived from tikal and two distinct (but the same text)
	articles got propagated from us.

	I am sorry for being a part of this problem.  We did not
	intend for anything like this to happen and think we acted
	appropriately to repair the fault.

	Bob Kunz