Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!brian
From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: NNTP 1.5 Patch 4
Keywords: NNTP 1.5 patch 4
Message-ID: <1720@ucsd.EDU>
Date: 15 May 89 20:47:32 GMT
References: <157@lib.tmc.edu>
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 26

Stan's latest patch reports code 
	503 program fail
when the server detects insufficient space for incoming news articles.
This is clearly the wrong code to use; it implies that something
permanent (probably requiring human intervention) has gone wrong.

One of the 4XX codes is more appropriate; I recommend the use of
	400 (the general-purpose goodbye)
to indicate to the distant transferring site that it should go away and
try again later.  Note that you should not send this until the remote
site actually tries to transfer an article to you; there are lots of
other things it could be doing that shouldn't be prevented just because
you can't accept more articles.

In fact, I'm going to suggest that servers supply a NEW code
	203 ready but I can't accept incoming news at this time
to indicate that both posting and incoming transfers should be deferred,
as this is useful both to clients and transfer agents.

Hmm. Looks like it's time to publish that update to RFC977.  Any other
changes to the specification you wanna make?

	Brian Kantor	UCSD Office of Academic Computing
			Academic Network Operations Group  
			UCSD C-010, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA
			brian@ucsd.edu ucsd!brian BRIAN@UCSD