rsk@j.cc.purdue.edu (Whitewater Wombat) (08/23/86)
The constant string NETCHRS in defs.h for news 2.10.3 beta may need some adjustment if your hostnames contain periods. This string is apparently contains characters which may be used to separate host names on various networks (e.g. "!"), one of which is currently ".". Well, since domain names tend to contain a lot of periods, news tends to get rather confused. Specifically, we observed hosts ping-ponging news back and forth since host "i.cc.purdue.edu" thought news originating from host "j.cc.purdue.edu" was really from host "edu". Of course, all the bounced articles were rejected, but with 11 local hosts exchanging news, the traffic was horrible...a few local articles apparently escaped off-campus in the confusion. I "fixed" the problem by removing "." from NETCHRS; I figure that since domain names use "." as a separator, that we won't see host names separated with "." in the future. I hope I'm right. -- Rich Kulawiec, pucc-j!rsk, rsk@j.cc.purdue.edu
fair@styx.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (08/27/86)
It is my understanding from Rick Adams that the 2.11 release of netnews will not have "." in the NETCHRS variable. I removed it from the NETCHRS list on the systems where I administrate netnews some time ago because of some problems related to gatewaying materials from the ARPA Internet into USENET. Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu styx!fair fair@lll-tis-b.arpa