[news.sysadmin] The News That Wouldn't Die

parmelee@wayback (Larry Parmelee) (09/25/90)

Mailed-Date: Tue, 25 Sep 90 09:30:25 -0400
News-Relay: @wrath.cs.cornell.edu

If you receive this by E-mail, please pass this message along to
whomever maintains the USENET news software on your system.  Thanks!

We are Still running an old version of news that automatically
moves to "junk" any articles with an un-reasonably old "Date:".
Over the past five days or so there have been a hundred or more
such articles a day.  I understand C news no longer discards such
old articles, so I suspect C news sites are the main cause of this
problem.  Someday "soon" we hope to upgrade to C news, but I'm
starting to become concerned about the number of old articles that
continue to circulate, and the load this translates into in terms
of wasted bandwidth and disk space.

Today I decided to look at the problem.  I noticed an article dated
"10 Aug", so I arbitrarily decided to look for all articles originally
posted on that date.  We have in "junk" at this time (25-Sep 1990,
7:30AM EDT), 304 articles with a "Date:" line indicating that they
were originally posted on August 10th, more than 45 days ago!!!  The
earliest one apparently re-arrived on the evening of September 21st,
with most arriving on the 22nd, and gradually tapering off since. 
Taken all together they represent 639092 bytes of data.  Do you suppose
that in another 40 days or so they will start showing up again?

The following is a list of the sites appearing on the "Path:" lines
in these old articles.  The number at the left is the number of times
a given site appeared in the 304 articles.  I cut it off at sites
appearing less than 50 times.  The shortest "Path:" listed 10 sites,
the longest listed around 31, the average works out to 18 sites.
I have listed the shortest and 3 of the longest paths below.

Any steps you can take to remedy this problem will probably be well
worth while.
-Larry Parmelee
parmelee@cs.cornell.edu         parmelee@cornell.UUCP

 304 haven
 304 e2big.mko.dec.com
 304 decuac
 304 cornell
 304 bacchus.pa.dec.com
 304 ames
 301 decwrl
 261 zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu
 252 sdd.hp.com
 247 rpi
 185 batcomputer
 161 wuarchive
 153 mailrus
 152 elroy.jpl.nasa.gov
  87 caen
  74 rochester
  66 umich
  64 mit-eddie
  63 uw-beaver
  60 uupsi
  56 kodak
  55 uunet

Shortest Path: 10 sites
        Message-ID: <1990Aug10.161050.1@tdocm2.mdcbbs.com>
        From: rothe@tdocm2.mdcbbs.com
        Date: 10 Aug 90 16:10:50 GMT
        Date-Received: 24 Sep 90 20:15:30 GMT
        Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking
        Subject: Foods they don't Make anymore...
        Path: cornell!mailrus!ames!haven!decuac!e2big.mko.dec.com!
                bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!uunet!tdocm2.mdcbbs.com!rothe

18 sites: (about average length)
        Message-ID: <1990Aug10.193926.8216@Solbourne.COM>
        From: dmy@Solbourne.COM (Doug Young)
        Date: 10 Aug 90 19:39:26 GMT
        Date-Received: 22 Sep 90 09:49:21 GMT
        Newsgroups: rec.arts.dance,rec.arts.poems,alt.prose.d
        Subject: 20 Questions
        Path: cornell!rochester!kodak!uupsi!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!
                sdd.hp.com!caen!umich!mailrus!ames!haven!decuac!
                e2big.mko.dec.com!bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!uunet!stan!news

18 sites:
        Message-ID: <9690@goofy.Apple.COM>
        From: vlb@magic.apple.com (Vicki Brown)
        Date: 10 Aug 90 19:44:33 GMT
        Date-Received: 22 Sep 90 10:31:29 GMT
        Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
        Subject: Re: How to tell if a process exists
        Path: cornell!batcomputer!rpi!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!
                maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!caen!sdd.hp.com!
                elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!haven!decuac!e2big.mko.dec.com!
                bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!apple!magic!vlb

18 sites
        Message-ID: <1990Aug10.142840.8864@pemstgt.gtc.de>
        From: tb@pemstgt.gtc.de (Tillmann Basien)
        Date: 10 Aug 90 14:28:40 GMT
        Date-Received: 22 Sep 90 20:33:54 GMT
        Newsgroups: comp.protocols.pcnet
        Subject: Re: Looking for ArcNet documentation
        Path: cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!
                sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!haven!decuac!
                e2big.mko.dec.com!bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!uunet!mcsun!unido!
                gtc!pemstgt!tb

29 sites
        Message-ID: <1990Aug10.193519.20826@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
        From: mrharrison@lion.uwaterloo.ca (Mike Harrison)
        Date: 10 Aug 90 19:35:19 GMT
        Date-Received: 22 Sep 90 19:06:46 GMT
        Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek
        Subject: Re: Spock's Brain, and, for good measure, Spock's Brain!
        Path: cornell!rochester!kodak!uupsi!rpi!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!
                ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!midway!msuinfo!sharkey!mailrus!ames!haven!
                decuac!e2big.mko.dec.com!bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!wuarchive!
                zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!
                mephisto!rutgers!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!
                maytag!watdragon!lion!mrharrison

29 sites
        Message-ID: <32532@eerie.acsu.Beffalo.EDU>
        From: riacmt@ubvmsa.cc.buffalo.edu (Carol Miller-Tutzauer)
        Date: 10 Aug 90 18:10:00 GMT
        Date-Received: 23 Sep 90 04:29:15 GMT
        Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking
        Subject: Re: Foods they don't MAKE anymore...
        Path: cornell!batcomputer!rpi!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!
                midway!msuinfo!sharkey!umich!ox.com!caen!sdd.hp.com!
                elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!haven!decuac!e2big.mko.dec.com!
                bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!
                mips!prls!pyramid!voder!apple!rutgers!ub!ubvmsa.cc.buffalo.edu!
                riacmt

Longest Path: 31 sites:
        Message-ID: <1990Aug10.193250.16544@bcars267>
        From: ppblais@bcars267.UUCP (Pierre P. Blais)
        Date: 10 Aug 90 19:32:50 GMT
        Date-Received: 22 Sep 90 14:52:45 GMT
        Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
        Subject: Re: Desktop publishing for X
        Path: cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!
                sci.ccny.cuny.edu!unmvax!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!
                kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!caen!umich!mailrus!ames!haven!decuac!
                e2big.mko.dec.com!bacchus.pa.dec.com!decwrl!sdd.hp.com!
                zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!
                news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!cunews!bcars8!bnrgate!
                bigsur!bcars267!bcars267!ppblais