tale@turing.cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (09/15/90)
In <49412@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre):
host:rec,world,soc,comp,...,talk,to.host:F:...
The to.host is a news group that you create locally. By posting your
control message to "to.host" then it will execute locally and be queued
for transmission to "host". Other entries will have "to.somethingelse"
so it won't be sent to them. Hopefully your neighbor will not forward
"to.host" to anyone else. This is very useful for checking up on what
your feed's sys file entry for you looks like.
Of course you should check with your feed that this is really the
case. It has come to my attention -- not through posting, fortunately
-- that a couple of my feeds have to.rpi in their sys files for me
even though I never claimed to have such a group and would ship
anything posted to such a name right out to a few sites after C News
dumped it in control. Yes, I've been aware of the convention for
several years. I don't do ihave/sendme though and have never felt a
need for a to.rpi so I never bothered with it; I wanted some of the
cruft out of my sys file. Most of the time when I set up a new feed
it might be easy enough for them to put in to.rpi because that is my
news name, but take the example of a feed I just re-established to
someone who's news name is a FQDN. He put in to.rpi (without me
mentioning it) and never mentioned what his to group was. Is it
really to.his.host.name? Or does he keep it up at just second level?
Beats me; I'd sooner send him a message directly to ask him a question
about his sys file or news version than I would post it through a
control message.
I could post a sendsys with a distribution of "ba" to find out what
my neighbors are doing without flooding the entire world. I
include the "ba" distribution in the entries for local sites but
not for feeds outside the area.
You're going to be pretty darn surprised when you get all the replies
then. Between people that allow more liberal distribution policies
through C News and sites like mine that take ba explicitly even though
we are quite far removed from SF there are a whole lot more sites
getting Distribution: ba than you probably imagine. You can cut down
on this by posting to ba.news.config directly with a Control: sendsys;
then at least you will only be getting the sites that get ba groups.
The ability to use selective transmission is one of the reasons to NOT
use "all" in the sys file. At the very least "all" should ALL ways be
qualified. For example:
"host:all,!to,to.host,!local:..."
with possibly other restrictions if regional distributions are involved.
Well, I think I'll add !to just in case people actually to ever try to
send anything down to.rpi.
--
(setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))
I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.