herbie@polaris.UUCP (Herb Chong) (07/07/86)
i've tried contacting Eric Fair by phone but he's incredibly hard to
get in touch with. i finally got a number that gave me a carrier so i
suppose i must have succeeded 8-).
it appears that a whole bunch of articles are coming from cernvax (on BITNET
into the UCBJADE gateway) for submitting news articles via mail. somebody
is looping generating longer and longer headers in front of the original
article. with the speed of BITNET, this could amount to 20 or more
articles per day easily. will someone find out what's going on and fix it?
Herb Chong, IBM Research...
I'm still user-friendly -- I don't byte, I nybble....
VNET,BITNET,NETNORTH,EARN: HERBIE AT YKTVMH
UUCP: {allegra|cbosgd|cmcl2|decvax|ihnp4|seismo}!philabs!polaris!herbie
CSNET: herbie%ibm.com@csnet-relay
ARPA: herbie@ibm.com, herbie%yktvmh.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu
========================================================================
DISCLAIMER: what you just read was produced by pouring lukewarm
tea for 42 seconds onto 9 people chained to 6 Ouiji boards.fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) (07/31/86)
To Herbie Chong and the other readers of net.micro.atari16, a belated word of explanation: if the ARPANET burps sends the USENET gateway duplicates, there are two scenarios: 1. they assigned a message-id and continually retransmit the same message. 2. they send out the same message over and over without a message-id. In the former case (which all such burps have been to date), USENET sees one copy of the offending message, and the gateway rejects the rest, because it has the message-id in the history file and recognizes the duplicates as duplicates. In the latter case (as with the problem cited), ucbvax assignes a new, unique message-id to each incoming copy of the message (feature of sendmail). Unfortunately, there is no reasonable way for the gateway to detect the duplicates in this case, so USENET loses big. Ideally, all mailers in the ARPA Internet should assign network-wide unique message-ids to all messages originating at the respective sites, but since that is not as yet the case, we grin and bear the currently imperfect world... As for me being easily reachable... Herbie tried to get me during the one week that I had a modem on the phone on my desk because we're moving our VAX (styx (nee lll-tis-b.arpa), *not* ucbvax!) and other machines, and had not set up reasonable hardwire access. So he unfortunately got modem screech in his ear. For this, I apologize; I should have set the thing to ignore incoming phone calls. I'm somewhat puzzled by not getting any notice of the call from the group secretary, though. After all, if he found my desk number at work (a cute trick, given that we had been in the new building for only two weeks at the time) he should also have had the general office receptionist's number... The quickest, most reliable way to reach me is what I sign off with: Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu