Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!pacbell!ames!oliveb!epimass!jbuck From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: No longer about April Fools (the Path: header) Message-ID: <2047@epimass.EPI.COM> Date: 1 Apr 88 17:41:29 GMT References: <1590@sigma.UUCP> <4750002@hpscdc.HP.COM> <47838@sun.uucp> Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA Lines: 70 In article <47838@sun.uucp> chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) writes: >>This "bug" prevents your transmitting the news items you receive back >>to your newsfeed. >>And maybe them sending it back to you, and you to them ...... > >It prevents transmiting it back, but the loop prevention is the reason >why we have the history file. It comes back, it's recognized as a duplicate, >it dies. Chuq is right on this one. Message-IDs and the history file are sufficient to prevent loops. They aren't sufficient to prevent wasted transmissions of articles; getting rid of Path: will significantly increase backbone news traffic (adding roughly one full feed's worth of traffic), since every backbone site talks to at least two others and passes full feeds back and forth. >This "bug" also prevents a message published in the name of someone >on a given site (a common occurance for moderated groups) from ever >being posted on the machine in question or any site downstream of them. It most emphatically does not! Some moderators mistakenly try to make the Path: be a reply address to the original poster. This is incorrect; read the RFCs. The Path: header should include the sites, and only the sites, where the article has been AS A NEWS ARTICLE. The From: and Reply-To: lines can (and should) be set to point to the original poster. The bug, if any, is moderators violating the spec. >On balance, this 'feature' is more of a pain than a convenience. This "feature" saves substantially on phone bills for anyone with more than one incoming feed and makes bidirectional feeds practical and economical. It encourages people to add redundancy to the net without imposing an excessive cost penalty. If an article comes to my site and is then rejected, someone has already paid for sending it. Since you're asking for a change that will increase the cost of operation of the backbone, it seems to me that you're not going to get anywhere. >>Sounds like a good reason to register one's sitename. If newsfeeds were >>routed only to registered sites, the problem wouldn't occur. > >Nice idea. Wishful thinking, but nice idea. Since registering is (and always >will be) voluntary, registering will never keep this from happening, since >both sides of a dispute need to register for the conflict to be resolved. >What if I decide to (or don't know I'm supposed to) not register. How do you >find out about me? The first thing that people at the non-registered site will find out is that they don't get any mail replies; the mail replies will be routed to the registered site (all mail from news sites with INTERNET defined, as well as all mail that passes through a site that does aggressive autorouting, will aim it at the registered site). The postmaster or system administrator at registered site will start to notice these odd replies. That's how you find out that someone is using your name. Note that it's not necessary to register your name to be "legit"; it's just that "Reply-To: user@foobar.UUCP" means "the foobar that appears on the UUCP map". You can always hack your news to generate reply addresses like "user%mysite@registered-site.domain", assuming that registered-site knows how to mail to you. -- - Joe Buck {uunet,ucbvax,sun,}!epimass.epi.com!jbuck Old Internet mailers: jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net