reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (12/23/85)
After an exchange with Stavros Macrakis I've recently discovered that there is a "feature" in the USENET software that makes mod.recipes postings fail to arrive at the machine from which they were posted, even though (in general) everybody else sees them. There is definitely still some thinking that needs to be done by netnews management about moderated groups. Over the next couple of weeks I will be reposting every recipe that has appeared so far on mod.recipes, modified so that everyone will get the postings. Sorry about that. Nobody told me there would be bugs like this when I signed up to be a moderator--I just assumed I could post things and leave it at that. An explanation, for those of you who care for the technical details: netnews is distributed using the Dalal reverse path forwarding broadcast algorithm. In a nutshell, this means that when a message arrives at your site, the news software looks at each of your news neighbors to see if the message has been at them, and then sends the message off to everyplace that it has not yet been, as seen from your site. The record of where a message has been is contained in its "Path" field, and when a message is sent to a new site, the name of the sending site is added to the beginning of the Path. Unfortunately, the initial Path, here at glacier where I post the message, is constructed from the "From" field of the message. I've been posting thinks with fields like From: suze@terak.UUCP (Suze Barnett) Well, what happens is that the message leaves glacier with paths like Path: glacier!suze@terak thereby making it look as though the message has already been posted to terak. Sooner or later that message will arrive at noao, which is Terak's main feed, and noao will look at the message to determine whether or not it needs to be sent to terak, and it will decide that it does not. Poof. The message never crosses the screen of its poster. If the poster happens to be at a news backbone site, then the failure is more dire, because not only will it fail to be posted to that site, it will also fail to be posted to anyplace "downstream" of them. I am currently exploring ways of posting messages that will allow the message to show up on your screen with the true name of the poster, yet will still reach the poster's site. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA