Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!csccat!egsner!eric
From: eric@egsner.cirr.com (Eric Schnoebelen)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: : 32-char ID duplicates
Message-ID: <1989Dec28.041428.21049@egsner.cirr.com>
Date: 28 Dec 89 04:14:28 GMT
References: <1555@aber-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Central Iowa (Model) Railroad, Dallas, Tx.
Lines: 31

In article <1555@aber-cs.UUCP> pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
- In article <24116@datapg.MN.ORG> sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG (Scot E Wilcoxon)
- writes:
- 
-     Someone recently pointed out some truncated message-IDs.  A search of my
-     history files showed that they contain exactly 32 characters.  Interesting
-     number. (Sorry, all my example articles have expired here thus I don't
-     have any Path:s)
- 
- But all the other articles posted had some HP site in their path. Since
- nobody has advanced this explanation, here is my stab in the dark:  the
- culprit for the various truncations *may* be Notes. If you look at headers,
- it seems that many HP sites internally uses Notes instead of C or B News.
- 
- What happens to the articles seems consistent with the logic of Notes.
- If it turns out that Notes has a 32 byte limit for ids or headers or
- whatever (I often see truncated subjects etc...), then this hypothesis
- becomes less speculative...

	Very astute!  Notes does have a nasty tendency to use
small fixed length buffers for things such as message ids, etc.

	Also, the notes/news interface is rather old, and tends
to be broken in strange and obscure ways.  I have helped fix
some of the problems with one of my neighbor sites who insists
upon running notes.. (I'm trying to bring him out of the dark
ages :-)

-- 
Eric Schnoebelen	eric@egsner.cirr.com		schnoebe@convex.com
			"/bin/sh: Bourne in the USA"