dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt) (05/21/89)
For the last day or so, we've been receiving a large number of
several-day-old articles whose contents appear to duplicate articles
already in our history files. These articles all have three things in
common... their article-IDs have a hostname of "sri-unix.SRI.COM",
the news-path is rooted at "sri-unix", and they contain a header line
of the form "Sender: root@unix.SRI.COM".
The "From:" addresses in these articles are from all across the Net;
the articles were not originally posted at SRI. It appears that
something within the netnews system at sri-unix has begun discarding the
original article-IDs, and re-injecting the articles into distribution
with new sri-unix article IDs.
This strikes me as Bad News, folks... this glitch could double newnews
traffic for as long as it goes on. I've send a message to both
Postmaster and usenet at sri-unix, asking that they remedy the
situation... no answer yet. Nobody answers the phone at the SRI
switchboard.
Y'all might want to keep a close eye on your news partitions for the
next few days... if you're treading close to the line, this surge of
duplicated news could cause your partition to run out of space.
Consider running expire more frequently, or running a selective
purge of all articles containing the "Sender:" line listed above.
--
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