Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!oliveb!jerry From: jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Registered sitenames Message-ID: <19402@oliveb.olivetti.com> Date: 4 Apr 88 20:32:33 GMT References: <1590@sigma.UUCP> <4750002@hpscdc.HP.COM> <3191@hammer.TEK.COM> Reply-To: jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca Lines: 72 Keywords: registered hostnames, domains, maps Summary: Using domain names in the "path" has many ramifications. In article pleasant@porthos.rutgers.edu (Mel Pleasant) writes: > One way or another, all sites within a domain must use fully >qualified names in all news and mail headers. This includes the Path: >header in news articles as well. The check against sending an article to a site already in the path is simple to bypass for anyone who has a real need to do so. The software simply compares the first field of the NEWSDIR/sys entry to each site listed in the path line. So an entry like: oliveb:comp,sci,...world:F would not send an article that has "oliveb" in the path but an entry like: oliveb+:comp,sci,...world:F:/usr/spool/batch/oliveb would send them because "oliveb+" would not match "oliveb". So anyone concerned about duplicate site names and willing to pay the costs of any resulting duplications can modify their sys file without changing the software. I have seen a case where a duplicate name was causing articles to not reach a site. There are two sites named "sun" on the net. I post "ihave" messages to one of the systems and while checking the articles in its sendme messages I found that every article from "sun.soe.clarkson.edu" was requested. Without the ihave messages there was no way for them to ever reach "sun.uucp". The suggestion that sites use a fully qualified domain name in the path header line brings up several ramifications. If I was to start putting "oliveb.olivetti.com" in the path line then my neighbors would start sending those articles back to me. This is because their NEWSDIR/sys entries have "oliveb:" in them, not "oliveb.olivetti.com". Obviously any such change would have to be coardinated with them. With the current software it is possible to ease the transition by having an entry like: oliveb/oliveb.olivetti.com:comp,sci,... which would catch both forms of the name. This would of course defeat the purpose of the domain as it would still not send anything with "!oliveb!" in the path so if there was another "oliveb" I still would not see their postings. Assuming I changed my path entries to be "oliveb.olivetti.com" and my news neighbors changed their sys files to match only on that string then the unique path test should work correctly. But that will leave somewhat of a mess. An entry like: oliveb.olivetti.com:comp,sci,...:F is going to put the batch output in a rather strange place. Certainly one not very useful to sendbatch. Of course you can manually specify the pathname to batch into. (Unless you want to run ihave/sendme.) Using full domains in the path is also going to make it several times longer. I am not against the idea but I think that practical implementation is going to require some changes in the news software to better support this. Perhaps the simplest is to provide a separate control of what is tested against the path line and what is used to generate the 4th field of the sys entry. By example if: oliveb/oliveb.olivetti.com:comp,sci,...:F Were redefined to use the first name "oliveb" for path and command generation and only test the portion after the "/" against the path then the changes would be minimal. Another alternative is to have the software truncate on the "dot" when generating the path/command. Certainly there is more to this than just having inews put your full domain in the path. Jerry Aguirre