mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (07/26/86)
I've gotten some questions about the procedure, so I'm posting some followups to clarify a few points. The test messages were posted to newsgroup mod.announce with distribution comp. This may seem a little strange, since comp isn't a distribution, it's a top level newsgroup class. The explanation is that, in the current implementation, newsgroup classes and distributions are somewhat blurred. "net" is both, for example. We are moving toward separating them, so that "comp" will be a class and "world", for example, a distribution. But they are not currently separate. This means you have to list all the classes AND all the distributions in the second field of each sys file line. There are currently no newsgroups in the comp class. We haven't sent out any newgroups for them yet, because we want to make sure that comp will get most places first. So to test it, we used comp as a distribution instead of a newsgroup. The current code makes them interchangable, so it does work. So what do you do if you didn't get the comp distribution version of the message? For starters, make sure you update your sys file, although your sys file being out of date won't prevent you from receiving that test message, it will just keep people downstream from you from getting it. If you didn't get it, look at your news to see what path you get most of your news from. (You can grep any newsgroup directory's * for "Path", for example.) Then start going upstream - talk to your immediate neighbor's SA, then their upstream neighbor's SA, etc. Find out if they got the test message, and if they've updated their sys file. Keep going until you find somebody who got the message who has updated their sys file; it's possible for more than one unupdated site to exist between you and the backbone. If you don't know who the contact person for that site is, look in the UUCP map (mod.map) for the listed contact person. You can also try mailing to site!postmaster, or site!usenet, or site!root. Or grep your /usr/lib/news/history file for that site, and look up any messages it finds; this will give you the address of some active user on that site. And above all, read net.news.adm. Future test messages won't be posted to mod.announce, they'll be posted here. (I don't want to give anyone a reason to unsubscribe from mod.announce.) I'll post them in pairs, one with a new class in the Distribution field, one without a Distribution. I'm going to post a test right after this one, to distribution "news". If you get this message and not the test message, you should try to determine why. Mark Horton