romain@pyrnj.uucp (Romain Kang) (10/13/87)
Erik Fair kindly sent me a list of the inet groups. If there's sufficient interest, I'll post the list to news.sysadmin; otherwise I'll just send out copies to those who request them. Armed with this list, sys admins can avoid passing inet groups to their downstream neighbors. If you don't care about the inet groups at all, you can alias each of them to "junk", so that they stay in junk once and for all, instead of seeping downstream to other sites. If you like to read the inet groups anyway, but shouldn't pass them downstream, you can alias them to fall under "inet": comp.lang.postscript inet.comp.lang.postscript If you want to post to such groups, be sure your upstream inet feed has aliases to transform the names back to a format sanctioned by the NNTP cabal (:-). If you're an impoverished downstream site, you can (nicely) ask your upstream neighbor to implement such aliases. It sounds so simple there must be a catch...
fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) (10/15/87)
Romain Kang's idea is bad juju. Don't do it. It is highly likely that, given the level of attention that most system admins give netnews, these aliases will leak to the rest of the network, causing havoc. Rick Adams is leading an effort to make most of the "inet" groups into "real" USENET newsgroups which will cure the leak problem just fine. Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu