sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) (03/12/91)
I currently have my modem being tied up getting almost a thousands articles in comp.os.minix. Lucky me (and dozens of other sites) are going to get a blast from the past: some of the messages I'm getting have dates from Jul 1990. Yes, *July*. As in, over 8 months old. Somebody screwed up, and I wish they would stop screwing immediately, if not sooner. Henry or Geoff, if you're reading this, can we please get a time limit in dnews? That is, if an articles is older than <bleah>, don't even bother entering it into the history file. That would have stopped this about 14 sites back. For the curious or morbid, here is a header from one of the files. The newlines in the Path: line were there as I got it, I didn't put them in. Path: kithrup!csun!nic.csu.net!csus.edu!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!hp-col!col!hpcc01!hplabs!ucbvax!ucsd!usc! cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!graham Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Assorted questions Message-ID: <877@sce.carleton.ca> From: graham@sce.carleton.ca (Doug Graham) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 1990 11:26:19 GMT Organization: Systems & Computer Eng. Dept.,Carleton University,Ottawa,Canada Lines: 92 I have no idea who the offending culprit might be. -- Sean Eric Fagan | "I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it; sef@kithrup.COM | I had a bellyache at the time." -----------------+ -- The Turtle (Stephen King, _It_) Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.
jstewart@ccs.carleton.ca (John Stewart) (03/13/91)
In article <1991Mar12.093943.21936@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes: >For the curious or morbid, here is a header from one of the files. The >newlines in the Path: line were there as I got it, I didn't put them in. > > Path: kithrup!csun!nic.csu.net!csus.edu!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!hp-col!col!hpcc01!hplabs!ucbvax!ucsd!usc! > cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!graham > Newsgroups: comp.os.minix > Subject: Assorted questions > Message-ID: <877@sce.carleton.ca> > From: graham@sce.carleton.ca (Doug Graham) > Date: Fri, 13 Jul 1990 11:26:19 GMT > Organization: Systems & Computer Eng. Dept.,Carleton University,Ottawa,Canada > Lines: 92 > >I have no idea who the offending culprit might be. Weird! The machine that this article originated on (sce) stopped running News last September or thereabouts and was entirely shutdown in January. These are truly "ghost" postings! -- "For those of you with aluminum or fibreglass canoes and paddles, you might try carrying your canoe around on the roof of your car anytime after New Years Day. Anytime before that looks pretty ridiculous. But after New Years Day, you just never know. Spring could come early." -- Bill Mason
pete@mimsy.umd.edu (Pete Cottrell) (03/13/91)
In article <1991Mar12.093943.21936@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes: > Path: kithrup!csun!nic.csu.net!csus.edu!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!hp-col!col!hpcc01!hplabs!ucbvax!ucsd!usc! > cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!graham > >I have no idea who the offending culprit might be. All of the old minix articles I've seen and checked here (I've seen well over 1000 in just one day, but haven't checked them all) have had sdd.hp.com!hp-col!col!hpcc05!hplabs in the middle of the path; there are various other hosts at either end of this string, so my guess is that some machine within HP is sending this stuff out (unless 'col' isn't an HP machine). I've seen these going back to February 1990. Sigh. I'm getting real sick of having my junk directory fill up. I know, C-news will be fixed at some point in the future. Waiting with great anticipation...... -- Spoken: Pete Cottrell UUCP: uunet!mimsy!pete INTERNET: pete@cs.umd.edu Phone: 301-405-2749 USPS: U of Maryland, CS Dept., College Park, Md 20742
kherron@ms.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron) (03/13/91)
sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes: >I have no idea who the offending culprit might be. Some crunching on the Path: lines of the offending articles reveals 1055 ukma 1055 wuarchive 1055 sdd.hp.com 1055 hp-col 1055 col 1025 hplabs 633 ucsd 554 zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu 515 ucbvax 494 hp-sdd [and so on] In other words, of 1055 articles with a 1990 date at this site, every one has the top five sites in the path. Col was the earliest site in each path I've looked at; this is probably the culprit. I gather that it's a Hewlett-Packard site, since it's bracketted by other probable HP sites. BTW, I'm seeing file dates going back to Feb. 1990, and as late as January of this year (the latter could be from a different screwed-up site since I left them out of the analysis, but I doubt it). Anyone listening at Hewlett-Packard? -- Kenneth Herron kherron@ms.uky.edu University of Kentucky (606) 257-2975 Department of Mathematics "Never trust gimmicky gadgets" -- the Doctor
brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) (03/13/91)
What I find even stranger is that although the path of the article shows ucsd in it, we no longer have any record of the article - so it didn't pass through here anywhere in the last 45 days. Any bets some long-forgotten uucp queue containing a restricted news feed finally became active again? I've seen that happen when a machine stops polling or is shut down, then started up again much later and some of its uucp feeds didn't clear out their spools in the interim. - Brian
geoff@athena.mit.edu (Geoff Collyer) (03/13/91)
Sean Eric Fagan: >Henry or Geoff, if you're reading this, can we please get a time limit in >dnews? As we've been saying recently in the news.all groups, stale article rejection is coming soon in C news. Depending on how quickly Henry wants to get the next patch out, stale article rejection may have to be explicitly enabled at compile time; a better solution will follow. On a related note, our current relaynews has observed that some sites put out articles with Date: headers containing no timezone (apparently due to a bug in gnus or gnews, fixed by Ed Vielmetti) and other sites (notably in Australia and New Zealand) are putting out local time and incorrectly labelling it GMT. Sites that generate Date: headers in odd ways (notably those that bypass inews): please verify that your posting software gets them right. (Currently inews doesn't touch existing Date: headers; the next patch will make it canonicalise dates in such headers.)
john@newave.UUCP (John A. Weeks III) (03/14/91)
In <1991Mar12.195103.284@ccs.carleton.ca> jstewart@ccs.carleton.ca writes: > In <1991Mar12.093943.21936@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM writes: > > Newsgroups: comp.os.minix > > I have no idea who the offending culprit might be. > Weird! The machine that this article originated on (sce) stopped running > News last September or thereabouts and was entirely shutdown in January. > These are truly "ghost" postings! Space aliens. They are injecting 6 month old backup tapes into the net as a signal that they are about to invade earth. Read about it next week in the National Enquirer. 8-) -john- -- =============================================================================== John A. Weeks III (612) 942-6969 john@newave.mn.org NeWave Communications ...uunet!rosevax!tcnet!wd0gol!newave!john ===============================================================================