rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) (04/13/91)
I have recently been receiving messages such as this: leading five sites sending news with bad headers: 2 mp.cs.niu.edu The funny thing is that the site listed is my own. What exactly is happening here? When I look through the log files, the timing of arrival of these messages suggests they really originated somewhere else (They appear in the midst of a stream of log messages from another site). Is this just a bad 'Control: cancel', or is it something else. Can the message be a little less misleading? -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science <rickert@cs.niu.edu> Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115 +1-815-753-6940
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) (04/14/91)
In article <1991Apr13.134056.30936@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: > I have recently been receiving messages such as this: > >leading five sites sending news with bad headers: > 2 mp.cs.niu.edu > > The funny thing is that the site listed is my own. What exactly is >happening here? Since I posted this, a possible explanation has occurred to me. I did receive some log messages the same day indicating unexpected nntp disconnects. It is possible that these caused bad batch files to be created. I wonder if this is what happens when you feed an empty file into relaynews? -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science <rickert@cs.niu.edu> Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115 +1-815-753-6940
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (04/14/91)
In article <1991Apr13.134056.30936@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: >leading five sites sending news with bad headers: > 2 mp.cs.niu.edu > > The funny thing is that the site listed is my own. What exactly is >happening here? The problem -- which I've already noticed, and complained to Geoff about :-) -- is that when relaynews can't figure out where the article came from, it attributes it to your own machine. This mostly happens because the Path header doesn't exist or doesn't contain something that looks like a path (i.e. no '!'). There is no good fix for the problem if some site hands you articles that have, say, just a name in the Path header. Relaynews simply has no way to tell that those aren't local postings. For the other cases, it really ought to be saying "???" instead of giving your own site name. -- And the bean-counter replied, | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "beans are more important". | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry