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