Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!dww From: dww@stl.stc.co.uk (David Wright) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Use of 'all' distribution in sys Message-ID: <1247@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> Date: 12 Mar 89 13:40:47 GMT References: <304@flatline.UUCP> <2004@wa4mei.UUCP> Reply-To: "David Wright" Organization: STL,Harlow,UK. Lines: 47 In article <2004@wa4mei.UUCP> news@wa4mei.UUCP (USENET admin) writes: #In article <304@flatline.UUCP> erict@flatline.UUCP (j eric townsend) writes: #>I accidentally newgrouped news.announce.newusers and news.announce.important #>Lesson: #>Never, ever, make a quick-n-dirty /usr/lib/news/sys file like this: #>mysite:all:: #>anothersite:all:L: # #Apparently there are a lot of systems that don't know better than to #use 'all' for the newsgroup and distribution lists in their sys files. What is wrong with 'all', *if* you specifically exclude local groups? Except for a national or other major backbone site, which probably does have to protect large sections of the net from strange groups, it is *much* simpler to pass all groups except local ones than to list all the ones you do want to send. I was able to make a major simplification to our sys file by changing from the old list of groups that were allowed to 'all' followed by the few forbidden groups. It also means that if a new distribution is agreed (gnu, bionet, etc.) we get it immediately without having to update our sys file - I only do that if we do not want it. Since making the change, I've been watching the log to check that the right things go to the right sites, and they do. Here's an extract from our sys file (another little trick to make the sys file more readable is to separate the entries with a # comment line - most people don't seem to realise you can do that). stl:all,to.stl:: # stc:all,!stl,!local,!test,!general,!followup:F: # ukc:all,!stc,!stl,!local,!test,!general,!followup:FL6: #other sites fed not shown in this extract We are stl, which is also our local distribution (2 hosts plus some nntp clients). stc is a company distribution - about 15 hosts - and also the name of the main stc host. You'll see that we feed out to ukc (UK backbone) anything not local or within stl,stc distributions and which started reasonably near to us, e.g. from one of the sites we feed. I also dropped the file name from the sys entry, as the default /usr/spool/news/batch/ is OK here. If I'm wrong, please tell me why. If I'm not, then careful use of 'all' can make sys files much more readable and thus easier to maintain. -- Regards, David Wright STL, London Road, Harlow, Essex CM17 9NA, UK dww@stl.stc.co.uk ...uunet!mcvax!ukc!stl!dww PSI%234237100122::DWW