alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) (06/08/91)
First of all, I wonder why people are making the assumption that every current
Cnews site would run whatever bad-header-notification program we may come up
with. In fact, the obvious problem of zillions of duplicate error messages
wouldn't be an issue if we could get just a few widely connected sites to run
such software.
Remember, the only problem sites are the ones whose messages are reaching a
large part of the net before they die. If you're a leaf off of a current Cnews
site, and you're posting bad headers, you'll _never_ see any responses. If
that doesn't clue you in, then the rest of us are probably better off not
seeing postings from your site. :-) (After all, that's what misc.test is for.)
So if a few well-chosen sites ran the software we'd be fine. Sites that spring
to mind are uunet, psi, and the european gateway (mcsun?). A few more wouldn't
hurt. Anything less than 30 or 40 machines should be fine.
This software should not respond to each individual message. It should cull
the log file for bad sites, appending site names to a file, which would be
processed once every two weeks or so. A script to do this would be trivial
to write, and could be run from newsdaily or cron as admins saw fit.
But what if we can't secure the cooperation of those sites?
There is another way, if somewhat less efficient. Once again, cull the log
file every day. Once every 15 days or so, build a list of offending sites.
Check the newsgroup news.software.offensive for articles whose "Subject: "
is the name of that site. If you don't see such an article, post one, with
an expiry of 1 month. Then send mail to that site's admin.
Lots of sites could run that software without causing major problems. As long
as people picked different starts for their 15-day periods, that is...
Now there is still the problem here of multiple notifications going to each
bad site. But because bad sites don't get to the whole net, there should be
enough localization, in concert with the throttling effect of checking the
newsgroup, to prevent mail floods.
If flooding is still a concern, instead of mailing errors right away you could
file them for another three days and check the newsgroup again. If another site
posted the same offending site you did, compare dates. If yours is later,
don't bother to send mail.
Comments welcome. Flames to /dev/null.
---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
alexis@panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis