Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: brentp@microsoft
Message-ID: <24399@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 88 20:58:08 GMT
References: <16262@ames.arc.nasa.gov> <16268@ames.arc.nasa.gov> <323@oucsace.cs.OHIOU.EDU> <9073@bigtex.uucp>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Lines: 17
In-reply-to: james@bigtex.uucp's message of 11 Oct 88 23:13:07 GMT

james@bigtex.uucp (James Van Artsdalen) writes:
   Since people are seeing different numbers of these articles, I assume
   there are loops in the feeds generating the multiple copies.  I
   thought site A would never send to site B if B was listed anywhere in
   the Path: line, but perhaps that is not always the case.  Does nntp
   use the Path: line to prevent loops, or does it depend solely on the
   history file?

NNTP is not involved in the decision of whether or not to forward an
article to neighboring sites.  That's strictly [ir]news' problem.
NNTP takes an article from a neighbor, hands the article to rnews,
which is then responsible for local installation into /usr/spool/news,
and then decides whether to add it to /usr/spool/batch/otherneighbor
based on the Path: line.  The NNTP daemon just waits for rnews to exit
before dealing with the incoming neighbor's next article.

--Karl