brian@natinst.UUCP (Brian H. Powell) (04/12/88)
All this pertains to news 2.11. This is a for-your-information
posting, not a bug-fix request.
One of the sites that I trade news with uses ihave/sendme to get the
news from us. We're a backup feed for them, so normally we only send a
few articles a day. This past weekend, that site's normal feed stopped
working, so that site sent a 1000-line sendme. Our machine immediately
queued up 1000 uncompressed unbatched articles for that site.
My UUCP logfile was about 10 times larger than usual because of this.
I tracked down why I think the articles weren't batched. It turns out,
near as I can tell, that the sendme mechanism in control.c only searches for
the first appearance of the sendme system in the sys file. It ignores
the newsgroups appearing in that listing; it's only looking for the third
field. I had this:
...
othersite:world,na,usa,comp,sci,news,misc,rec,soc,talk,alt,to.othersite:L:
othersite:world,na,usa,comp,sci,news,alt,to.othersite:IF:
...
These entries send locally-posted stuff out very quickly, and the other
news that "othersite" wants is ihave/sendme. Since sendme only searches for
the first "othersite" entry in the sys file, it didn't know that I wanted the
news to be batched.
If you change the order of the sys file to be this:
othersite:world,na,usa,comp,sci,news,alt,to.othersite:IF:
othersite:world,na,usa,comp,sci,news,misc,rec,soc,talk,alt,to.othersite:L:
I think it will work okay. You can probably change the news source to do
it better, but I didn't bother to figure that much out about it.
The administrator for the anonymous "othersite" noted that you can
probably get private postings through this feature. Since the newsgroups
are ignored on a sendme search of the sys file, it's possible to ask for
postings that they would/should not ordinarily receive, e.g., postings
intended only for local users. You just have to cook up your own sendme
article, which isn't hard to do. That's a security problem I leave to
the authors of current and future news programs.
Brian H. Powell National Instruments Corp.
brian@natinst.uucp 12109 Technology Blvd.
ut-sally!im4u!natinst!brian Austin, Texas 78727-6204
(512) 250-9119 x832
or if that doesn't work, you can use brian@sally.utexas.edu.