Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!ambar
From: ambar@athena.mit.edu (Jean Marie Diaz)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: pseudo inews puts client hostname in "Path:" line
Keywords: inews nntp path client
Message-ID: <5397@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 17 May 88 09:23:55 GMT
References: <21631@oliveb.olivetti.com> <3289@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <21931@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: ambar@athena.mit.edu (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: Madhouse International Technologies
Lines: 36

In article <21931@oliveb.olivetti.com> jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>In article <3289@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> phil@east.Berkeley.EDU (Phil Lapsley) writes:

>>When somebody posts news through pasteur, say from "cory.berkeley.edu",
>>the path line becomes:
>>
>>	Path: pasteur!cory.berkeley.edu!user
>>
>>which is ok; any replies will get to pasteur, which is a registered UUCP
>>name, and pasteur can handle the cory.berkeley.edu business to do the
>>right thing.  "pasteur!user" would be wrong.

>When I was writing I was aware of the fact that the user might not
>have an account on the server and that replies using the path could
>cause problems.  My assumption was that that such sites would maintain
>mail aliases on the server site. [...]

Well, I agree with neither of you (suprise! :-).  My context is running
the news server for MIT Project Athena.  I don't want the client (ie,
workstation) names anywhere; they don't receive mail.  Our mail hub,
athena.mit.edu, maintains all the mail aliases for all our users, and it
is pointless (as well as difficult) to duplicate this work on our news
hub, bloom-beacon.mit.edu.  So (as you can see from this posting), the
Path: line comes out as bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!user (which will
work, if ya gotta...), and the From: and Reply-To: headers come as
user@athena.mit.edu (correct!), and life is sweet.

I'm just grateful that it was relatively trivial to hack the nntp inews
to DTRT.  rrn, on the other hand.. (grrr) .. has that stupid .UUCP hack
hardcoded in 2 different places, as well as some other lossage induced
by our weird situation (cancel messages don't work).  Although we're
running the NNTP1.5 server, our rrn client is still 1.3, 'cause I don't
want to do that hacking again, really.

                              AMBAR
ambar@bloom-beacon.mit.edu                    {backbones}!mit-eddie!ambar