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From: news@ivucsb.sba.ca.us (Todd Day)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.admin
Subject: Re: question on bad newsgroups
Keywords: nomatch
Message-ID: <805@ivucsb.sba.ca.us>
Date: 29 May 89 20:48:53 GMT
References: <185@icdi10.uucp> <730@dtscp1.uucp>
Reply-To: news@ivucsb.UUCP (Todd Day)
Organization: The Audio Club at UCSB, Isla Vista, California
Lines: 22

In article <730@dtscp1.uucp> scott@dtscp1.UUCP (Scott Barman) writes:
~>May 27 00:29	local	Unparsable date "31 Dec 69 23:59:59 GMT"
~Where do these come from?

I'm not sure, but here's my theory.  Someone's machine (probably a
Xenix system :-) is returning -1 from the time(2) function.  There
is probably no error checking done by inews (who would ever suspect
that time(2) would return with an error?), and it passes this to
ctime(3c).  ctime(3c) does no error checking, either, and faithfully
converts the -1 to one second before the UNIX big-bang.  The funny
thing here is, I'll bet that the date parsing function DOES parse
the bogus date properly, and returns the -1, which is interpreted
as an error by inews!

Actually, since your logfile says "local", maybe it is YOUR machine
that is producing the bogus date!


-- 

Todd Day | todd@ivucsb.sba.ca.us | ivucsb!todd@anise.acc.com
"All theory, no practice.  That's the story of my life."